


If Only Tonight We Could Sleep

by Sleepmarshes



Category: Soul Eater
Genre: Alternate Universe - Zombies, F/M, Minor Character Death, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-18
Updated: 2015-03-22
Packaged: 2018-03-17 13:01:25
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 55,894
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3530348
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sleepmarshes/pseuds/Sleepmarshes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His eyes turn to her, bright, gleaming blood, and she can't stop herself from gripping her knife a little more tightly.<br/>"What is 'ma-ka'?" he asks warily.<br/>"Me," she admits. "What are you?"<br/>He smiles, though it's more of a pained grimace. It's then she notices the dark, filthy tie-down straps wrapped around his chest, attaching him to the tree. "Soul," he says. "...Usually."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Straightaway a forgetting wind

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings for sexual content, zombie-related gore, a close shave with a sexually abusive situation (Giriko), murder, death, violence, vomit, psychologically distressing situations, various bastardized mythos, and improbable uses of Twitter clones and other geeky technology.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No sexual content in this chapter.

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

At first, she thinks he's one of them. This is terrifying, because all this time she'd been climbing trees with the belief that they couldn't climb up after her.

His teeth are all points, like piranhas and wolves and _them_ , and what little she sees of his eyes are that telltale red giveaway of the turned. He sees her the moment she sees him, only two swaying branches away, and as she opens her mouth to cry in terror and despair, he hisses his first words to her.

_"Don't scream!"_

She knows the turned can 'speak' -- usually in one or two-word sentences -- but the desperation in his face silences her despite her misgivings. Maka clings to her branch, crouched and tense, ready to spring into action. Her hand stays close to her side, where she keeps the long meat slicing knife at her hip. The man in the tree jerks his chin to the ground, and she sees what he's worried about.

The Old Crone has shown up. She hobbles about over the tree roots, walking slowly, looking where there is nothing to see. Maka recognizes her and frowns. Old Crone has been following her for weeks. She hasn't seen the turned in four days, which is the longest she's ever been able to escape her.

She's safe up in the tree. Old Crone, like all the turned, can't climb this high. Besides which, that one is blind -- had been before she'd been bitten -- and it is easy to outrun her. Maka has lost count how many times she has skirted around the zombie and casually jogged to escape.

To be truthful, it would be just as easy to slice the Crone's head off, but Maka has yet to be able to do it, despite all the others she has beheaded.

The branch sways gently in the wind. After so many months of climbing, only nailing her feet to the tree would make her steadier than she already is. She looks away to the bigger threat of the two. Maka unsheathes her knife, focusing once more on the stranger in her tree. Well, maybe it had been _his_ tree first, but it is hers now, and she's not eager to share with someone who looks well on his way to turning.

"Who are you," she growls, voice scratchy with disuse, and watches his eyes follow the gleam of her knife in the late afternoon sun. _"What_ are you," she corrects.

His eyes bulge a little, but it's exasperation, not fear. _"Would you shut up,"_ he grits through his fearsome teeth. "It's gonna hear you."

He looks too big to be wedged on a branch that flexible. She is more suited, with her thin body and light limbs -- Papa used to call her 'little sparrow'. This stranger, on the other hand, balances his weight completely differently. Not like a bird, who perches gently, but a wiry bear, who makes the tree adjust to him. She wonders if he's made of steel, if he'd make a dent in the ground if she pushed him off his branch.

She raises an eyebrow at him, though her overgrown, matted bangs probably hide it from view. "She already hears me."

The stranger strings together an impressive array of curses that involve herself, her mother, and her mother's face, with the turned woman below added in for good measure. "You idiot," he says, searching the immediate area for more zombies. "It's going to draw them to us!"

The knife droops in her hand a little. Turned people don't fear the turned. Maka sighs, looking back at Old Crone. She hadn't learned her name from before. The woman had insisted on calling her 'Gran'.

"She won't. She follows me around and just..." Maka trails off, idly swinging the point of her blade in the zombie's direction. Safe in the tree, they both watch as Old Crone sits at the base, settling in for the catatonic stasis that all of the turned fall into when there's nothing nearby to eat. She sits like a tiny boulder, her thinning, snow hair flitting in the breeze.

 _"Ma-ka,"_ Old Crone chirps, and goes silent.

Maka studies her tree neighbor, gauging his reaction to the zombie's unnatural behavior. His eyes turn to her, bright, gleaming blood, and she can't stop herself from gripping her knife a little more tightly. "What is 'ma-ka'?" he asks warily.

"Me," she admits. "What are you?"

He smiles, though it's more of a pained grimace. It's then she notices the dark, filthy tie-down straps wrapped around his chest, attaching him to the tree. "Soul," he says. "...Usually."

 

 

* * *

 

 

"I don't remember how many days ago it was," he tells her as he gratefully accepts some of her water. "The fever fucks things up sometimes. It happened the day it rained." Soul looks to her, asking silently for her to confirm how many days have passed.

She nods, remembering the long drizzle. She counts back, marking her days by Old Crone sightings. "Nine days, at least. Maybe ten." When that number sinks a little further in her mind, she stares at him. "How are you _alive?_ Turning takes three days at most --"

"Tell me about it," he remarks, closing his eyes tiredly. He looks uncomfortable, face somewhat gaunt, but he's warned her to not get too close, so she does nothing.

"Where were you bitten?"

He shifts a little, pulling his arm out of his coat sleeve. From wrist to elbow looks like a murder scene, but he pours a few drops of water over the old, caked blood, and rubs it. He reveals new skin surrounding black scabs.

She doesn't know what to think, and can only state the obvious. "It's healing," she breathes in wonder.

"Yeah," he says with a weak chuckle. "Seemed kinda weird. I'm not the only one, though. There've been reports of others."

Maka stares at him, trying to understand what he's saying. There are people who are resisting the strain? There are more people, people who speak and laugh and fear and -- "Wait, reports? From _where?_ Who is reporting? How are you --"

Soul gives her his first genuine smile, made savage by his teeth. "Twitter," he says with a smug expression, though his constant, feverish shivering kind of nulls the effect. "Well, a clone, since the original databases have been down for mo--"

She doesn't know whether to choke him or praise him. "You have a computer? That charges?"

"Phone. Solar charger."

The amount of deserted Radio Shacks and phone retail shops she has passed in the past four months hits her like a ton dead bodies. Why hadn't she thought of that? "The internet exists," she says in shock.

"Yeah, kinda. I mean there's a lot of pricks on there but you can't exactly infect the --"

"Shut up! How many are there? Like you?"

Soul looks askance. "If you're right about the date, probably no one. Someone was one day behind me, but I don't remember how long ago that was. Could be dead by now." His body gives one violent shudder that rattles the leaves in the tree. "Phone's in my bag."

Maka climbs closer to his branch, but it's hard to keep her distance with no other nearby branches to cling to. "Careful," he warns, turning his face away and closing his eyes. "The wound's healing, but... don't know about me."

He's very still save the occasional shiver as she unlatches and unzips a heavily fortified pocket. The contents of the bag gleam at her in various shades of chrome and matte gray, a mother-lode of hoarded technology all tangled together. Gingerly, she pulls out a blood-stained smartphone that wears a case that could have been an armored truck in a past life.

"Watch the cable. I ran out of 'lectrical tape."

The phone is connected to a charging device that is securely fastened to his padded backpack. Multiple mini solar panels are attached to the bag, dark and searching for the sun, with delicate wires spliced to the charging cable. "You made this," she says.

"Yeeaah, apart from the whole half-zombie thing, I'm kind of a geek. Feel free to thank me anytime."

It takes Maka a moment to find the button on the phone to turn on the screen. Half a dozen posts all with the ' _resistance_ ' hashtag gleam at her. She blinks, realizing it's been a few weeks since she's read words -- she'd been keeping to the forests lately.

"'Pianoman'?"

"That's me."

"...'BlackStar'?"

"That's the guy I've been talking to. Been trying to get to him and his group, but..."

Maka swipes her fingers across the screen. She doesn't understand how he's still getting cell service, but she's not going to look a gift horse in the mouth. She silently reads the new updates, equal parts excited to see human life and confused because she doesn't understand what they are talking about.

"What's it say," Soul asks, and she relays as best she can, stumbling over acronyms and slang. But one tweet she understands completely.

"'At-ShadowStag bitten-'"

"Fuck."

"'Resisting. Going to At-Prometheus. All Resistance: thirty-six degrees, four minutes, fifty-five seconds north. One-fifteen degrees, seven minutes, twenty-nine seconds west. Going to Vegas, bitches'."

"Fffuuuuck."

His groan of anguish is pretty discouraging, but she asks anyway. "What's 'Prometheus'?" Because she knows the old stories -- of men brought to life from clay, of a titan stealing fire for mankind -- and she's not sure she wants to hear the answer.

He says, "A guy you see when your only other option is death."

 

 

* * *

 

 

She gives him her last can of tuna. She hates fish anyway.

As night falls, he explains to her how BlackStar and ShadowStag have broken into a cell service building, granting permissions for unlimited data plans, bypassing billing cut-offs, and living off vending machine food. They and a small band of other survivors have been jerry-rigging cell towers in the valley to generators and solar panels.

Soul had been planning to meet up with them, to help as much as he could with his tech skills, but he'd been bitten on his way there. He'd tied himself up in the tree when he reached a point where he wasn't sure he was safe to be around, or coherent enough to protect himself from ambush. His fever became so bad that he'd lost track of days. Then she'd shown up.

He vomits the tuna almost two hours later, falling into a shivering sleep. She doesn't try to get closer again; it's dangerous to climb trees in the dark. She listens to him moan in his sleep, the tree continuously shaking. She rests, but only a little at a time, because his moans kind of sound like the turned and sleeping in a shaking tree is hazardous at best.

As soon as the sky begins to brighten in the east, she gingerly flits over to his branch. His hair is caked with dried mud, or blood, or both, but she notes the roots of his hair are pale and white, like all the turned. She watches his chest rise and fall, and clings to this fact, because the infected do not need their lungs when they go in stasis. Or ever. Carefully, she touches her grimy fingers to his sweat-slicked forehead.

A human. He's warm, but not frighteningly so. He could use more water, but she has none. She'll have to go back into the valley.

"Soul."

Red eyes open, but she realizes they aren't the same kind of red as Old Crone's sightless eyes had become. His sclera remain white instead of that deadened gray of the turned. It takes a breath for the man to focus on her face, but once he does, he startles, rearing back from her. The tree sways violently, his strap creaking against the bark.

_"Shit!"_

"Calm dow--"

His feet slip. His fever has wasted away his body, and the strap around his chest is too loose. He slides in the loop, which cinches under his armpits as he struggles to not fall from the tree. He kicks wildly at first but then stills, focusing on staying attached to the strap and not falling through it further. Below him is Old Crone, staring sightlessly in his direction through little over twenty feet of empty air.

Quick and lithe, Maka climbs above him, praying her weight will not make the whole section of the tree collapse. She straddles a branch, trying to ignore the whining creak it makes under her, and reaches for the handle at the top of his backpack.

"Urrgh," she groans, "are you made of _lead_ , seriously-"

Eventually, she steadies him enough that he can get his feet wedged and get back to relative safety. He looks ready to either collapse or burn the entire forest.

"Fuckin' hate heights." He gives her a warning look when she climbs over to him, but doesn't tell her to stay away. "Thanks."

Her hand still hovers near her hip in precaution. "Yeah. Sorry."

Below them, Old Crone chirps. _"Ma-ka."_ The turned woman stands, rotating until the breeze pushes her feathery white hair forward, obscuring her face.

Like watching a weather-vane, Maka realizes something. "It's changed." She looks at Soul. The plural comes out of her so easily. "We need to go. I'd been downwind of the mob, but now they'll know where we are."

_"Ma-ka."_

Soul looks at Old Crone and back at her, conflicted. The hand of his left arm flexes, and she pictures the bite wound under his jacket sleeve. "I..."

"You'd be safe up here, but I have no food to leave with you." And though logic tells her this man is a dangerous liability, she doesn't think she can just abandon him.

He sighs, resigned. "It smells like rain," he quietly says.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Soul is wobbly on his legs, but more or less keeps up with her pace. He digs through his bag of gadgets and comes out with a GPS, pointing them to the coordinates of Prometheus. On the outskirts of the valley, they avoid the suburbs and give wide berths to any parking lots still filled with cars. Those give too many places for the turned to hide.

They stop to rest every few miles -- he's weak and dehydrated, she's starving and running on too few hours of sleep -- but once she sees Old Crone hobbling over the horizon, she knows it's time to move again.

She keeps one eye on her companion, partly to watch out for signs of aggression, partly to watch his health. His fever continues to break, and he discards his jacket, shoving it into his bag, and keeps to the shade as much as he can, sweat rolling under his bloodstained shirt. She's not faring much better -- rainclouds lurk overhead but refuse to spill, making the air sweltering hot and humid on top of it. Sweat stings her eyes as it drips down her forehead.

His coordinates point them to the heart of Las Vegas, and the further into metropolis they go, the less comfortable she becomes. There are less trees to climb, less safe places to hide. Maka eyes a stop light thoughtfully while Soul cautiously inches toward a convenience store. She could probably shimmy up one, as long as it wasn't wet. She doubts Soul could, though, even if he weren't so fatigued.

Then again, as she watches him pull a crowbar out of his bag and signals her to keep watch, she notes that he still has some wiry muscle along his arms and chest. He gives a vending machine a few shattering swings.

Still, traffic lights aren't ideal fortresses. Maybe a nice, residential rooftop could do in a pinch, but there are nothing but office buildings and apartment complexes out here, and if there are stairs to the roof, there would be zombies on the roof.

Soul pulls out bottles of water and stuffs them into a canvas bag. He grabs a few other bottled drinks -- the ones with the highest caffeine and sugar contents -- and then begins to strip the machine for wires and electrical components.

She's too on-edge to sit placidly while he meticulously wraps cables into tidy loops. "Hurry up," she urges, impatient. "We need to get moving." She hasn't seen Old Crone waddling down the alleyway, but she feels that she should have by now, and that bodes worse. The streets are littered with scattered trash and bloodstains, and the buildings are closing in on her. "Soul --"

"I heard you the first time," he says, quickly shoving things into his backpack just as the sky begins to drizzle. When the water touches his face, he stills, instantly on alert. He'd told her he'd been bitten when it was raining, and she doesn't blame him his associated paranoia. Soul glances down the street they had come. "Where's your groupie?"

He's getting better at telling Old Crone time. Maka frowns, silently chastising herself for feeling worried about a zombie.

She shrugs. "Lead the way. I don't like it here," she murmurs. She takes the canvas bag filled with bottles and slings it across her chest, one hand never too far from her hip.

"What's with that one, anyway," he says after a while, turning down a street lined with palm trees that make her feel a little better. "It's still dangerous, right?"

"She attacked me the moment she turned." The drizzle only made her sweaty body feel more disgusting. Her feet ached. Her heart ached. "She's slow, though."

Bluntly, he asks, "Why didn't you kill her?"

Heavy rain hisses down the avenue, catching up to them. "Because it was my fault."

 

 

* * *

 

 

She'd followed the screaming and met the old woman.

Even blind, she swung a mean skillet. Her grandson had been making the noises she heard on the television, she told Maka, and so she crushed in his head. She'd almost crushed in Maka's, too.

It'd been one week after the outbreak, and the world had fallen into chaos. "Call me Gran," she said. Gran mourned her children, her family, but always smiled in Maka's general direction when they shared a meal. "'Maka'," Gran told her. "That's a neat name."

"My mother gave it to me," she replied.

Gran did not ask about Maka's mother, merely saying, "She gave you a wonderful gift, then."

She was blind, and Maka knew the old woman couldn't see her tears, but she seemed to know they were there, just the same.

Maka had left to search for food on the fourth day. When she came back, the old woman was dying. The turned one that had ripped open her throat lay in a heap on the floor, skillet embedded in its face. Maka was supposed to have protected her, had promised herself she wouldn't let it happen again, not ever, not for anything.

Borrowed knife in hand, Maka watched as the woman quickly turned, Gran's eyes reddening, hair changing from silver to snow. When she opened her mouth, there were no fangs. She'd lost her teeth years ago.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Soul starts shivering again just after noon. He pulls his jacket from his bag and zips himself in it. She thinks it probably fit him better before he'd been infected, but presently it seems to swallow him up with the excess leather. He doesn't say anything, but she watches him slowly hunch into himself, pressing through the rain, keeping his crowbar tightly in his hand.

He needs to eat something. So does she, for that matter. But there are no safe places to stop and raid -- at least none she is comfortable with -- and rain makes it difficult to hear anything coming for them.

They turn a corner and the sound of a generator reaches them. They share a look, and Soul suddenly glances skyward, searching. He shuffles further down the narrow alley and says, "If there's a generator, there's--"

And then he's tackled by a blur at the other end of the alley.

Maka hadn't known she could run so fast, but she's hurling through the shadows, flying into the next street, sparrow-turned-hawk, with her knife in one hand and the heavy bag of drinks in the other. She swings the latter at the stinking blob in a business suit straining for Soul's neck. The zombie pitches to the side, and Soul angrily shouts as he introduces the hooked end of the crowbar to the turned man's face. The meeting creates a sickening splatter sound, but Maka refuses to dwell on it.

There are two others, one close enough to reach for her, and she carves him a new mouth with a slash of her knife. She kicks it back, toppling it before she crushes its neck with a well-practiced stomp. The third is a child, baby teeth gnashing like tiny razors, and Soul knocks its head off with a backhanded swing, like popping off a dandelion from its stalk.

His breathing is hoarse and ragged, and she carefully approaches him, ears straining for any other visitors.

"Soul. Are you bitten?"

It takes him a moment to answer.

"No."

"We need to get out of here," she gently says, though all the adrenaline in her blood tells her to scream.

Without another word, he shuffles through puddles towards the generator. She follows, eyes darting to every shadow in the wide courtyard they have stumbled into. A small fountain lay in the center, shattered concrete darkening in the rain. A false palm tree sits near the back of the area, rigged with cellular antennas. Underneath it, atop rickety, leggy scaffolding, is a generator shielded by stray sheet metal and plastic.

Maka climbs up the scaffolding at Soul's insistence. He's busy throwing up at the foot of the fake tree, eyes haunted by children. She gathers he hasn't killed nearly as many zombies as she has, much less the smaller ones. Her heart is already hardened against that kind of thing.

The generator is loud and deafening, the fumes from its exhaust choking her. She doesn't like being deaf, and she hopes Soul will keep his eyes peeled between dry-heaves. In various ammo-caches and battered buckets, she finds energy bars, painkillers, bandages, and all manner of useful things. She takes half of everything, leaving behind a few sodas and a bottle of water.

Back on the ground, Soul is standing, looking more or less over his episode, until she steps closer and finds he actively keeps himself at a certain distance. His hand clenches, partially hidden by his jacket. She tosses him a protein bar. He looks a little green as he examines it, and puts it in his pocket.

He does eventually start eating it, as they head towards whomever it is the internet calls 'Prometheus', so he has some common sense left to him. Her hand stays locked around the handle of her knife, watching for any stray movement slinking across buildings or lurking behind windows.

"So," she says, in effort to see if Soul is still capable of more than one or two-word sentences, and maybe for her to remember what it's like to have a conversation, "just what kind of guy is 'Pianoman'?"

The crowbar in his grip dips and sways a little bit. "Not sure I know, anymore," he says, looking lost.

"Do you just like Billy Joel or...?"

He scoffed. "Well, that too. But yeah, I played. When I was a kid."

"You quit?" she asked, watching the rain wash the mud from his colorless hair.

"Don't have much time for it now, you know?" he replies, but she doesn't think that's an answer to what she's asking.

 

 

* * *

 

 

They run into another small group of the turned, and there aren't any children this time around, though Soul still looks half a step away from losing his protein bar after they're all taken care of.

He gives her a look under damp hair, surrounded by decapitation and crushed skulls. "If I don't know my name anymore, you kill me," he informs her, but she knows it's truly a request.

She nods easily, like they are discussing what to raid from a grocery store. When her heart attempts to make itself known, she plays the adrenaline card and ignores it, like she always has.

They are forced through another alley as they approach the waypoint on his GPS. She takes it on herself to scout ahead, because Soul's increasing fever paints him in shades of sickly gazelle, and he holds the crowbar like it has gradually become fifty pounds heavier. He's an easy target right now, and she doesn't enjoy leaving him behind her, but pushing him ahead like bait on a line feels worse.

It's just as well, because as she peeks her head out of the shadowy, wet alley, she spies a retro-looking _'Welcome to Paradise'_ sign out in the distance, surrounded by hundreds, hundreds of the turned in various states of stasis. The smell of old, decaying death teases her, and slowly, slowly, because abrupt movements draw their attention like hunting cats, Maka silently backs away.

She can't believe it, but she's actually _shaking._ She's never seen so many in a mob, so many blank, red eyes, so many rotting heads with hair like a bank of snow. Her pathetic slicing knife feels like useless plastic hanging on her hip. When Soul's bleary eyes (red, red, from between dripping avalanches of white) ask her silent questions, she shakes her head, or her body shakes it for her.

"We--" her voice cracks. She clears her throat. "We can't go that way. Not ever." Not for anything.

It takes him a minute to focus on what she's explaining on the GPS, telling him where it is impossible for the two of them to go. He blinks slowly, a full body shudder running through him like a reset button having been pressed somewhere in his brain.

" _All_ of it?"

"All of it."

"Do I wanna know?"

"Probably not."

He reroutes the GPS, backtracking to the west but still heading north, giving a wide berth for The Strip. He doesn't make it another three miles before he stops in the middle of the road.

His arms clench over himself, fingers digging into opposite sleeves. He's shuddering with pain or sickness or other. Prometheus is a man you go to when death is your only other option, he'd told her, but he hadn't added the implied _'if you can make it there'_.

"Maka... I can't go with you."

Before he'd asked her to kill him in the event he forgets his name, she had already decided this would be the warning. This would be the sign she'd accept to cut him down and save herself.

He's like a little beast with that hunchback of a giant backpack on him, and she wonders how she had mistaken him for a steel-filled bear at the start. Knife in hand, she watches his eyes follow the stream of water trailing down the edge of her blade. It would be better to end it now, before the infection takes him. Before he becomes another Old Crone, she tells herself; another ghost to follow her around and remember her name for her.

But, like facing the Old Crone, she can't keep her knife pointed at him.

He sees her hesitation and she doesn't know if he looks disappointed or relieved. "Just... tie me to something and go." Soul coughs into his hand. Wipes it on his pants. "Take the... the thing and find Black Star--"

Maka grits her teeth and stalks forward to him. He sees her knife and holds his ground without complaint, looking away and awaiting death. She grabs one of his arms and pulls him back the way they came. She hopes they don't run into the Old Crone on the way. She drags him, hears him stumble, but refuses to look back. He already looks like one of _them_ , so it wouldn't make a difference if she watches him turn or not.

She remembers seeing a tree earlier -- had noted its high branches for future reference because it is always important to know one's exits out of a _shitstorm_. Its limbs are a little too flexible for her liking, but the medium-sized shade tree on what used to be a busy street corner will have to do.

She points, and he shakily attempts to climb. Fails.

It's nerve-wracking to go up before him, to have her back turned to him after having seen his eyes dart to any and all sudden movement (and she without her knife in her grip), but she does it anyway.

Maka turns around in a giant fork of intersecting branches and gives him a hand up. His palm is outrageously warm, and she knows she's too overwhelmed with worry over a man she hasn't even known a full day.

That worry may become her undoing, she realizes, as she's trying to balance while he's attempting to neither collapse nor freak out over heights, and they're too close in this slippery, wet tree. His mouth is inches from her shoulder, sickly heat radiating from his slouching body, and her heart stops as she watches his lips part a little wider, Soul's half-turned fangs peeking out. His breath washes over her shoulder like a furnace.

She doesn't scream. She says it in a terrified whisper. _"Soul?"_

He slaps a hand over his mouth, groaning. He twists, his opposite hand sliding from the central tree branch and colliding into her thigh, blindly grasping for support. The contents of his stomach splatter loudly on the pavement below: protein bar and _other_. Maka holds him steady, clinging to his backpack and jacket to keep him from hurling any more of himself out of the tree.

His body relaxes a little when he's done, though he's gasping for air like he's afraid his lungs will stop working. She's afraid of that, too.

"My bad," he says, shaking.

"Thanks for aiming it elsewhere," she replies, trying to not sound like her heart had been gripped by terror half a minute prior.

"No problem."

She gives him a moment to steady himself, but it only seems to weaken him further, so she hops across slippery branches and situates him. He looks reluctant to part with his backpack, but she thinks it's because it'd been keeping him warm. Soul holds his arms away, crossed over his side-turned face, mouth tightly shut as she wraps his tie-down strap around his chest and secures him to the sturdiest branch of the tree. "Tie it behind me," he murmurs, "so I can't undo it."

She doesn't tell him that the turned are too single-minded to be able to untie knots, but she does as he asks. His shivering makes fat drops of water slide off leaves from overhead.

At his behest, she tweets their coordinates and tags it with ' _#resistance_ '. There are few updates, and only from other people announcing they've left the cell towers to meet up with Prometheus at BlackStar's command.

The rain lets up for a few minutes only to come down steadily once again. She does not want to sleep in the rain, in the valley, and a few blocks from The Strip and its enormous mob, so after she gives Soul some water, she eats an energy bar and washes it down with caffeine.

She refreshes the feed on Soul's phone and sees an update in reply to Pianoman.

 

_**@Pianoman** u bastard ur still alive? get here ASAP. **@Prometheus** wants to xmn u #baller_

 

Maka glances at Soul, who dozes with his head tilted on a branch. Her feet swing idly on her own limb, rainwater dripping down her legs. She hazards a reply.

 

 _ **@BlackStar**_ _Pianoman feverish and weak. Treed at coords. Enough su-_ -

 

"Ma-ka."

She jumps, barely keeping her scream in her throat. Peering down at the ground, she lifts up her dangling legs after she realizes how close they hang over Old Crone's head. The zombie circles aimlessly around the tree a while before settling for a spot on the sidewalk, becoming her little boulder. The turned is heedless of the rainwater washing across the pavement.

Maka nearly drops the phone when Soul speaks. "I still don't understand your groupie," he rasps.

She pushes her soaked bangs out of her face, partially longing for the days she was alone and her heart didn't startle from anything.

"Neither do I," she replies. "I've covered myself in mud, soaked my clothes in death, done everything I could think of to change my scent, but she always finds me."

Old Crone can track her through rain, through twisting alleys, through winding forests. Soul doesn't bring up what kind of danger having such a companion poses, which is just as well, because she wouldn't be able to tell if he would be lecturing about Old Crone or himself.

"She's blind -- maybe she can sense you better than most."

 

_She gave you a wonderful gift._

 

Her hardened heart twists a little in her chest.

"How did you get your name?" she quietly asks, but gets no reply. Worried, she looks at his face, hand darting for her knife. She finds him asleep again. Relief dribbles down her spine with the rain.

She returns to the phone.

 

_Enough supplies for two days, can't take him to **@Prometheus** alone. Any help wanted._

 

She's buzzing with caffeine, and every rattling breath Soul breathes in puts her more on edge. There's a reply from BlackStar almost immediately, but she doesn't find it until an hour after the fact, wanting preserve the battery life of the phone.

 

_**@Pianoman** who dis? Pianoman turning?_

 

_**@BlackStar** Survivor. Accidental partners. Not sure. The walkers find him alive enough to attack._

 

The next reply, which she doesn't wait a freaking hour for, is a set of coordinates.

 

_Safe. Near u. Get there. Will send help._

 

 

* * *

 

 

She wishes fever pills had been at the generator cache. Maka uses a rain-soaked bandage to wipe grime from his face. He sleeps most of the night, murmuring. At dawn, he tells her she looks like shit.

Maka grimaces. "Good morning."

"Not like you looked great to start with, but damn. Did you sleep at all?"

"I took Mountain Dew as my mistress," she says blandly. "How're you feeling?"

'Like hell' is what his face tells her, but he says, "Like my name is still mine. Hand me somethin' to eat, I'm starving. I'll throw stuff at you if anything shows up."

She can't process this all at once, and stares blankly at him.

"Go to sleep, idiot."

"Oh."

One side of his mouth twitches upwards. A kind smirk of sorts.

She glowers. "Don't call me an idiot."

"Whatever, gimme my phone before you pass out."

 

 

* * *

 

 

When she starts awake, the rain has stopped. The city is still echoing with the loud clang of a crowbar hitting pavement. The Old Crone is booting up from stasis like an old Macintosh, and Maka's heart dances querulously in her chest. She glares death and carving knives at her tree captive.

"My bad," Soul grits through his teeth, hand still outstretched in the direction of his fallen weapon.

"How did you _live_ this long?" she snarls, eyes adjusting to the afternoon light. She's still too fuzzy from sleep, ears straining for any sound of The Strip mob.

Soul shrugs helplessly. "Man, I'm a geek. I'm more amazed than you are -- _what are you doing?"_

Maka carefully swings behind him and starts undoing the strap behind his back. "We have to go. That thing was louder than any scream--"

_"Ma-ka."_

"--and we need to go _now,_ before the Welcome to Paradise committee finds us."

Soul twists his head to snarl over his shoulder, _"Then just leave me here!_ You really are an idiot -- I don't even get why you stayed in the first place!"

"Shut up." Her fingers fumble in her hurry to undo the strap.

His voice holds a desperate truth that he seems unwilling to let out. "You keep saying 'us' and 'we' but you know you can't afford that."

When evening comes in a few hours, it will be two days since she has met him. Below her, Old Crone begins staring into the abyss with blank red eyes and grayed sclera. Her limit has always been four days -- with Papa, with Gran.

"Maybe third time's the charm," she says, and sets him free.

She ignores the burning look on his face and digs through his bag for the GPS, shoving it into his hands. "The new coordinates. You saw them, right?"

"I saw them. You should've just killed me."

"Hurry."

He juggles the phone in one hand and the GPS in the other, plugging in the numbers. He gives her the GPS when he's done. She holds his gaze, looking into his eyes that are still framed in white instead of gray. _"Let's go,"_ she says, deliberate.

Soul looks torn between the dread of turning on her and the fear of being alone, and Maka decides that as long as he still possesses some inkling of the latter, she can not abandon him, because she has that fear too, encased in layers of stone.

She waits for Old Crone to wander around the tree while she dashes to an opposite limb, dropping to the ground at a distance. She lures the turned away while Soul skids his way out, shakily landing on the sidewalk and picking up his weapon. Maka jogs around the Old Crone, bypassing her to catch up with Soul and follow the waypoint to BlackStar's safe haven.

 

 

* * *

 

 

The sky is clearing, sunset blood painting a partly cloudy sky in the west. They're running out of daylight. They're walking with the wind, blowing their scent in the same direction they're heading. The fucking coordinates from a random person she's never met is taking them towards The Strip. She doesn't like this.

"Are you _sure?_ "

"I'm sure."

"He said it was safe."

"I know what he said, I can read."

"When was the last time he checked--"

He doesn't interrupt her, but rather stops at a parking meter, body still as glass. His eyes peer through a broken shop window.

Maka shuts up. She wets her lips, unsheathing her knife. She watches his eyes dart too quickly, pupils slowly dilating like a hunting cat.

Very quietly, he says, "We should keep moving," and slowly takes a step forward, eyes not leaving the darkness of the ransacked shop.

The hand on her knife is shaking, as if the blade itself is unsure who its target should be. Her ears strain for movement as she smoothly walks forward, making her motion as fluid as possible. She is a bird, gliding, gliding, silent as an owl in flight. Her hand is sweaty on the knife handle. It's the beginning of day three, she tells herself. Nothing will happen today.

A family of turned tourists crawls out of the broken window, oblivious to the shards of glass.

She and Soul work in silence, because screams and shouts would only draw more zombies. As she deals with the husband, she tries not to over-analyze how her partner has no issue going after the children first, how his attention snaps to their quicker movements, how, overnight, he has become eerily efficient at avoiding their fangs.

The wife of the family is large, and her little knife isn't enough to behead her in one swing. Soul finishes off what she can't with a wrenching pull of the hooked end of his crowbar. Maka sidesteps the falling body, knife, still poised to strike if need be. Noticing, Soul flings gore off his weapon and takes a carefully measured step back from her.

"Let's keep going," he murmurs, sweat dripping off his nose.

He doesn't waste their time throwing up again, and the practical side of her wonders why she's disheartened about it. She hasn't thrown up after fighting in months, and she's still human. But she wonders about that, too.

What _is_ 'ma-ka'? Does she know? Her heart whispers something, but she ignores it.

The Las Vegas freeway comes into view. It's a creamy colored bridge stretching for miles, seated atop thick pillars. Silent as a tomb, it stands like a solemn monument to the spectacular crash and burn of mankind. The GPS points them to a spot just on the other side, nestled near a small tangle of on and off ramps. The darkening twilight makes shadows under the bridge come to life.

Familiar outlines of famous casinos do not ease her heart. She sees the Stratosphere hotel in the distance, the blackened walls of the burned Trump tower, and the shape of old Treasure Island. They are all neighbors of The Strip, and had probably been densely populated when the outbreak hit. All of it will be teeming with walkers.

Soul's fever has broken again, his jacket crammed into his backpack. Black bloodsplatter paints the side of his neck and jaw, slowly dripping with his sweat. His coordinates bring them to a library surrounded by a sea of empty parking lot, landscaped trees, and gravel as a grass substitute. Across the street is a gentleman's club, broken windows like empty sockets.

They stand in front of the entrance of the squat library. She doesn't disguise her displeasure.

"This is his idea of safe?" If left to her own devices, she would never touch this place. There's only one way in, no back door, and there are windows every fifteen feet around the building.

Even Soul sounds kind of skeptical. "He wouldn't steer us wrong," he slowly says, keeping his crowbar out and ready as he inches towards the front door.

Maka balks, shaking her head, not liking the open area or the feel of walking into a slaughterhouse. "Soul, when we go in there, the Crone will catch up. She'll be right here, blocking us in--"

He looks over his shoulder, confused. "The who?"

"The C-- the groupie."

Soul gives her a look she can't interpret. "You're just gonna have to kill it, then."

 _You or her?_ She almost asks, but she has a feeling he would just say 'both'. It-she and It-eventually.

He finds the key to the door up high, nestled in a hollow of the concrete building. At her dubious look, he says, "Any place BlackStar has called 'safe' is a place his group's been." He unlocks the door.

Maka turns around watching the street as Soul creeps inside. "I think I need to have a talk with this guy about the meaning of 'safe'," she mutters. She hears him zip open his bag and dig around, all his techie-junk clattering together. He pulls out a flashlight.

"Get in and shut the door."

When she locks it, the deadbolt slides home which either sounds like comforting security or the snap of handcuffs -- she's yet to decide.

The library smells like a library. Dust, paper, ink, age -- and it is so refreshing that Maka is forced to stop and breathe in the musty, stuffy building. It's been awhile since she's smelled a place that didn't reek of death and decay. Even in the forest, the wind had carried the stench of the undead. In here, it only smells of antiquated humanity.

Still, they carefully search, stealthily checking between bookshelves and desks for any catatonic surprises. Every shelf is another dose of adrenaline. Maka's eyes look everywhere but where Soul's flashlight shines, body tensing at book carts and step stools and chairs. The shelves seem to tilt, ready to close over her like heavy jaws.

Then she sees the writing on a wall. She points, he shines the light. An array of discarded ink-jet cartridges litter the floor, the word 'Exit' smeared on the wall. An arrow points at the ceiling. A signature melded with a five-pointed star notarizes the message.

"Black? Star. Pfft," Soul scoffs.

The beam shines on the ceiling, revealing a pull string for an attic door. The light shudders violently for a moment, Soul's breath jaggedly escaping him. She can hear him loudly swallow, hear his left hand tightly clench the plastic flashlight in pain or sickness or _other._

As eager as she is to check out their means of future escape, Maka says, "Let's finish clearing this place." He leads on.

She doesn't like it -- all the places for the dead to hide, all the windows, the low, low, low ceiling- it feels like a cage. But they find no one. The only surprises they stumble over are miraculous and mystifying.

"...I think this is soap," she mutters in disbelief.

Soul finds long tapered candles, lighting one with a cigarette lighter he has to dig out of his gadget-filled treasure bag. He lights several more with the wick of the first. Flames dance. In an open corner of the building, the closest windows are pinned with dark sheets and ratty flags. The makeshift drapes ease her, somewhat, glad the candlelight won't be shining out the glass like advertising a human buffet.

Among the safe haven's cache, they find cans of unlabeled food, a bottle of ibuprofen that's filled with a rainbow of pills that _aren't_ ibuprofen and a paper roughly cataloging each color, miscellaneous first aid supplies, a shotgun with the better part of a box of slugs, and a patchwork quilt that makes her heart waver with thoughts of Gran. Plus the soap.

Regarding the gun, Soul asks, "You ever shoot before?"

Maka grimaces. "Uh-uh. You?"

"In... video games?" he tentatively offers. They share an equally skeptical glance. "Best not shoot it unless we have to. We'd attract everything for miles."

Looking once more upon the cache, she notices it: "There's no water." Her hand grips the canvas bag slung over her shoulder, feeling the contents she has already memorized. They have two and a half bottles left from Soul's vending machine raid, and those are just rainwater she had funneled into bottles they'd already emptied.

Soul shivers in silence a moment, his eyebrows furrowed and stark in flickering firelight. He turns to the small restroom they already scanned for bodies. Maka follows, pessimistic. "City water hasn't been pumping in months," she reminds him, but follows with one of the candles anyway.

The restroom is cramped, not meant for more than one person at a time. "I have a feeling," he says, and invites her in with a wave, though he attempts to stay as far away from her as possible at the same time. He reverently faces the toilet.

It's an absurd looking thing to her now, like being in the presence of an ancient and enigmatic altar of civilizations long past, though it has only been a little less than five months since the outbreak. Maka has been relieving herself by trees, at walls and bushes and freshly dug holes; the toilet is alien to her.

Soul presses the handle with a grimy finger. It flushes, which is to be expected with old water having been in the tank since before the city water had failed.

"We probably should've saved that," she says angrily as it flows down the drain.

The toilet refills. The two of them stand in utter silence until it finishes. Slowly, as if she is afraid she is dreaming, Maka reaches for one of the twin knobs atop the small bathroom sink wedged up against the wall next to the toilet-altar. She twists. The room echoes with loud gurgling and groaning before rusty orange liquid dribbles out the faucet.

"No. _Way,"_ she blurts, watching the water slowly run clear. She turns it off. Turns it back on. "H-how--"

Soul makes a collection of noises that have no meaning before saying, "It's... It's gotta be well water or something. Only a few older places still have them..."

"Do you think it's safe?"

"One way to find out," and he sticks his face under the spout, taking a big gulp. Shocked, Maka's mouth hangs open, unable to speak. He wipes his mouth with the inside of his shirt collar. "Gotta be a well. Tastes like ours, before they switched us to city water. Kinda mineral-y, _ow Jesus WHAT--"_

She slaps the back of his head again. "Don't do that!" she screeches. "What if it's poisoned?! What if it's infected?!"

He dodges her fist, trying to keep his distance in the cramped room. "Maka, I'm _already_ infected, I'm prolly gonna die anyway--"

"Don't do that again! Not ever! Not for anything!"

"The fuck, stop hitting me," he snarls, exasperated. "It only makes sense, damn it -- out of the two of us, I'm the least likely to make it to Prome--"

"You have to _live,_ " she insists, shaking in anger.

"...Don't particularly disagree with that statement, but let's be honest, here."

Her eyes burn, and she feels childish. She'd been in the woods for months, and three days with this idiot already has her fearing being alone again. She'd been lost, in the woods. She'd lost herself in the woods.

"There could be an answer in you," she says, desperate to give him a reason to not gamble his life because he's nine of ten steps closer to death than she is. "No one has lived this long infected, right?"

Something in his face seems to dull and harden, and she looks away, eyes downcast and permanently attached to her stained boots and his ragged sneakers. In her peripheral she sees his left hand stretch forward, maybe almost reaching for her, but his arm passes her by, turning off the sink.

"Fiiiine, I won't do anymore taste tests." He sighs, playing his part of the boy being lectured by his mother. His hands burn as he gently grasps her shoulders, maneuvering around her to exit the room. He touches her as little as possible, palms quickly removed from her the second he can escape. "If I forget my name, though," he says on the way out.

"I'll kill you. I promise," she says to her shoes.

She's a little bird lost in the woods.

 

 

* * *

 

 

After a debate over the benefits of smelling like a dead body versus being able to wipe one's mouth without fear of cross contamination via zombie guts, Maka relents and tries to freshen up in the bathroom. A teasing comment of _'I didn't realize those weren't freckles'_ may have prompted her to angrily slam the bathroom door.

She's reluctant to wash all the grime off herself; that smell is camouflage. She supposes her very not-white-anymore tank and threadbare pants are filthy enough to take care of that in the future, though, and the idea of letting her skin breathe something other than twenty layers of apocalypse is hard to pass up.

Her hair is a challenge in itself. Her head doesn't quite fit all the way in the basin, and to be honest, one bar of soap will never be enough. She gets through one rinse and calls it a day.

She finds a musty wash rag in the cupboard under the sink and, apart from the soap and bandages, it may be the cleanest thing she's touched in a long time. Several minutes of vigorous smearing and scrubbing later, and she unearths her face in the mirror, but it's so gaunt and tanned and severe-looking that she doesn't recognize it as hers. With some contacts, a dye job, and fake fangs, she could pass off as a walker with little difference.

When she comes out, feeling strange with scrubbed skin under rank clothing, Soul is huddled under the quilt and tied to a formidable office desk. His eyes are darting too much for her liking, but he gives her a weary smile when he sees her (though he sees her much more easily in the half-dark than a normal person ought).

"My mistake," he says, teeth rattling together. "You do have a few freckles."

She shifts her weight, double-checking the familiar pull of a knife hanging at her hip without moving her hand to hover over it. "I'm starting to think you're into bondage," she deadpans.

He claps under the quilt, the sound muffled. "Was that a joke? I think it was. I'm proud." He grins, teeth gleaming. "As for bondage -- I'm into it if you're into it." His grin widens.

She hopes his hunter's eyes don't see her vicious blush. "Ah, I see delusions accompany the fever."

"You clean up good, what can I say." He's still trying to make up for the original freckles comment, and Maka scoffs, watching his shudders jostle the candle on top of the desk.

"...Can I get you anything?" she asks, determined to not sound sad or fearful for him (or of him).

Soul rests his head on the side panel of the desk. "I'd do anything for a pizza."

She leaves and returns with his backpack and two unmarked cans. She sits on the floor across from him, digging around his bag for a can opener. "Which flavor would you like? 'Anonymous', or 'question mark'?"

"Anons are usually trolls. Gimme the punctuation."

He gets canned pears in heavy syrup. She gets Spaghetti O's. "I've always been bad at gambling," he says, sipping the syrup and trying not to choke on it.

She doesn't really mean it, but says, "We can switch halfway--"

"No-no, keep your rigged anonymous shenanigans," he insists. "Besides, I'll prolly puke in an hour. That's just a waste of s'gettios." The inside of the quilt lights up, the glow from his phone illuminating his face as he looks at the screen. "Well, I got bad news and questionable news."

Maka picks salty noodles from between her teeth with her tongue. "Okay."

"I'm about eighty percent sure the update about us gettin' here went out. I'm positive the cell towers went down before I could see any replies. At least the ones around here, anyway."

"Eighty percent," Maka echoes, mentally weighing their options.

"Like I said, though: I suck at gambling," he says, setting down the can of pears with a sour face. It's not even halfway empty.

She brings him the bathroom's trash bin an hour later. He groans when he's done. "S'the worst pizza I've ever had twice."

"Sorry. I left my Italian half at home," she says, wiping the wet rag on his face while he's too tired to warn her to stay away.

"You're half Italian?"

"No, not even close." She doesn't have a home anymore, either.

"I swear to god, either I'm hallucinating or you're getting _funny."_

 

 

* * *

 

 

His fever doesn't break again. Dawn shines through the uncovered windows while Soul fitfully sleeps. He has two modes when awake: mostly lucid and smart-assed, or twitchy and grave as death. Throughout the day, he blearily stares at the text inside books she has brought him, or ties useless knots in various cables from his bag.

That evening, he claims to feel well enough to attempt his hand at using some soap, and Maka keeps her distance, knife in hand, as he unties himself and holes up in the bathroom. In there, he's coughing, coughing, retching and coughing, and she waits outside the closed door, staring at the gleam of sunset and candlelight on her blade. It's the start of day four.

The coughing stops, along with her heart.

 

_If I don't remember my name--_

 

"Soul?"

A long silence.

"Speaking," comes his hoarse voice from the other side, raw from the abuse.

She breathes. She's so relieved she can't speak for a moment. "Do you... need help?"

"I'm cool," he says, voice cracking. "Don't... Don't come in here. Please."

The world swims around her, thick and smothering. She thinks she's going to be sick.

 

_Don't open the door, little sparrow, not for anything._

 

Maka bites her lip in silence.

She hears the sink running for a bit. Hears him spit. Hears his shoes skid on cheap linoleum as he sits on the floor. "Still there?"

"Yeah," she forces out.

"...Keep talking."

Legs wobbly, she kneels, stabbing the blade of her knife in the carpet. She faces the door, conversing with the wood. "I don't have much to talk about."

"What is 'Maka'," he rasps, voice like the crinkling of dried husks and snake skin.

"It's the name my mother gave me," she says. "I don't know what it means. I don't know if it means anything," she tells him.

And words begin to fall from her, slowly, in orange rusted water, clearing to flow from a deep well she hasn't seen the bottom of, divulging ancient civilizations from the age of Not Quite Five Months Ago. She's Maka Albarn, twenty-five, newly moved to Nevada. She likes track and field, drum and bass, mac and cheese, and cats. She used to live in libraries like this one, studying for Sociology. She escaped in books, books about myths, legends, animals, people. Strong people, normal people, cowardly people. She's killed twenty seven men, nineteen women, twelve children. The numbers never go away, even though they were already dead, because she's accustomed to collecting data about people.

She has no siblings. She hasn't seen her mother in years. Her dying father committed suicide to keep himself from coming back to life. He used to call her 'little sparrow'. She's yet to keep anyone safe for more than four days.

"I've never been on a date," she says, grasping for anything else to say.

"With your shitty taste in--" he coughs for several seconds, "--in music, I'm not surprised."

"Screw you," she says, though it doesn't cover the warble in her voice.

"Don't think it'll help much, but if you're offering..."

Maka puts her face into her knees, groaning.

"I can't believe you're older than me."

Of all the things for him to pick out of her ramble, that fact had been the furthest from her worries. "How old are you?"

"Twenty-two."

She hadn't given much thought about his age beforehand -- the turned features of his face made it hard to judge to begin with. She'd only been fixated on the fact that he breathes. Then it hits her.

"Wait, how old did you think _I_ was?"

He coughs again, but only half of them sound legitimate. _"Jailbait,"_ he says between hacks.

She does not understand why she's blushing. She growls in frustration. "It's my chest, isn't it," she murmurs, defeated. "There's practically nothing there."

"No," he says, "they're there, trust me." To her stunned silence, she hears the door lock.

"You son of a--"

"Look, when you jump around in the trees, they just kinda... _bounce,_ you know?"

Curse his zombie eyes! "Soul..." she hisses.

"Speaking. Can't kill me," he gasps before he retches.

 

 

* * *

 

 

On day four, the Old Crone knocks at a flag-covered window, chirping. No one dies. No one comes for them.

 

 

* * *

 

 

They run out of food on day six. It would have day five, but Soul had stopped eating anything save fever reduction pills and sips of water. Mostly, he sleeps, too exhausted to do anything as his body tries to battle infection.

Every few hours, he manages a short conversation. Today, he tries to talk her into leaving him.

"The old co-ords are still there. You could make it, easy," he says.

She ignores him. She will not abandon him. "I'll be back soon. Wait for me."

He shakes his head, mouth carved into a nauseated, deep-set frown. "Be _careful,"_ he snarls helplessly.

Maka follows BlackStar's exit sign, cautiously climbing up the attic ladder and shimmying through layers of musty, itchy insulation. In the roof, she finds another one of those obnoxious star insignias. She pushes a recently installed handle and opens a tightly-sealed hatch door.

Outside, it's late morning, the air already warm and dry. She follows arrows across the flat roof, hopping to an outstretched branch of a tree that's barely more than a sapling, nearly earning a black eye from a flexible limb. Old Crone hears the noise and stands out of her boulder pose, hobbling in Maka's direction.

Maka heads west, back under the freeway and as opposite from The Strip as she can get. Without someone holding her back, she can dart in shadows, scrape her hands and legs on palm trees to survey the area, or break into a run at a moment's notice. But without Soul to watch her back, checking abandoned buildings is slow and nerve-wracking.

She perches on top of the overturned trailer of an eighteen-wheeler strewn across a crack-ridden street. She's the vulture watching for scraps and predators and competition. She has hit the mother-lode: a family run automotive shop-turned-grocery store, complete with rotted produce sitting in scattered baskets and crates inside wide-open garage bays. There may be canned goods in the main building. Maybe preserves or pickled vegetables in hand-packed mason jars. At the very least, there's an unopened vending machine in the far corner of the garage.

She wears Soul's jacket because, by virtue of the bite wound he'd taken, it smells like infection and death more than the rest of their clothing combined. She has watched the shop for fifteen minutes, the tops of her washed ears beginning to burn in the sun. Normally, this kind of waiting is overkill -- Old Crone will be upon her soon -- but she thinks she'd heard an unusual sound earlier, and being cautious keeps a person alive.

She hears nothing else, though. Maka decides to make a quick raid, hit the vending machine on the way out, and get back to the library. Silently, she hangs off the edge of the trailer and drops down. She glides into the cool shadow of a garage bay, knife at the ready. Wilted, browned vegetables and fruits perfume the air with the faint sweetness of rich decomposition.

Pausing next to a broken window, she watches for any movement in the interior of the main building. She sheaths her knife and gingerly climbs through the frame, Soul's leather jacket protecting her hands from thick, reinforced shards of glass. She hides against a wall, taking inventory of everything in view on the three squat shelves of cans and jars.

She catalogs which items have the most value, not seeing flavors or meals but protein or mineral or energy. Deciding on how much she can safely carry, she drifts forward, collecting everything and quietly storing it in her canvas bag.

Mindful of the glass jars, she climbs back through the window. When she turns around, she's face to face with a gun.

A growling voice rolls across her skin. "Hand over the bag, you scrawny fuck-- Oh. You have _tits."_

Her body trembles. A man with dirty blonde hair, scraggly chin beard, and bored blue eyes gives her a once-over. A survivor? He is tall, built like a truck, and she can't comprehend how someone can still have so much muscle mass. Why would he threaten to kill another breather?

"Th-there's a bunch left in there still--"

"And you delivered," the man sneers, pointing the gun from her forehead to under her chin. "Appreciated." His free hand slides the strap of the canvas bag off her shoulder. Maka doesn't move, praying the knife trapped between her hip and the broken window remains hidden. "I'll be takin' the jacket, as well."

What kind of luck is it, she wonders, to be robbed during the apocalypse? "You wouldn't shoot that here, you'd draw every zombie on the block," she hisses, watching her armor be stolen. She understands the muscle mass, now. Bullies are well-fed.

"It's got a silencer, slut." He jabs her jaw, forcing her face upward. "You're kinda cute, in that biker gang crazy bitch sorta way." His mouth parts in a lecherous smile. Maka restrains the urge to projectile vomit. "How old are you anyway? Eighteen? ...Seventeen?"

Her hand inches towards her knife, glowering at this dipshit who'd somehow lived to see the end of the world. She's never considered attacking an uninfected person before, and she's not sure how that blank reply of apathy from her conscience defines her as a person.

 _"Sixteen?"_ he fishes, his teeth gleaming like broken glass, deadly and full of promise. "Shit. S'not many of us left, you know," he murmurs, one hand creeping near her waist. "And, all considering, you're _awfully_ clean."

She's never touching soap again. She shudders, revolted, when his fingers trace up her side, thumb brushing over her breast. He leans in close, towering over her, the barrel of his pistol digging meaningfully into her jaw. "You gonna scream?" he warns, breath hot in her ear.

"No," she grits out. _But you will._ Her hand closes over the knife’s handle.

"Kinda disappointing, actually," he says, pulling the gun away so he can replace it with his mouth.

_"Ma-ka."_

She doesn’t scream. The two bullets sound fake, muffled and whispering through the silencer to lodge into the Old Crone's face. The survivor is snarling, gun still pointed at the turned old woman crumpling to the rotted tomatoes and celery, and Maka reaches out, heart shrieking, a sparrow-turned-falcon that cries over this unjust hell, _this city of death,_ and takes her one talon and stabs him under the armpit.

He howls. Her internal timer begins _now_ , ducking behind him and striking again inside one of his thighs. Shots fire wildly, ricocheting off the metal of the garage. She gets one good stab that she hopes is in the general vicinity of a kidney and gets an elbow slammed to the side of her head in return. She crashes back through the broken window.

As she topples, the image of a gun barrel flashes in her vision, and she hears the ghost noise of a bullet being fired. Something touches her shoulder -- a lukewarm caress that gently plows through her skin and leaves muted lava in its wake. In the next instant, she's groaning on the floor with broken jars of pickles and jelly, and she thinks she's been shot. The entire left side of her back is heating, igniting, aflame with pain. She looks at the window she'd fallen through, blood painting thick, fang-like shards.

She's running out of time. She can't find her knife, but she sees the gun held around the side of the window and pointing blindly into the building. She rolls away, mason jars shattering between whispers of bullets. Maka blinks away thundering pain that threatens to black out her vision, and she sees the knife at the base of a shelf. She reaches out with a foot to drag it closer.

"FUCK, what -- you _cunt_ what did you -- _**urrgh!"**_

She'd aimed for arteries, is what, but she’s suddenly fixated with the blade of her knife, the red blood of the survivor thinly spread over the dark stains beneath it, and realizes she may have done something much worse than murder as she listens to the teeth-gnashing screams of her attacker.

Pain vibrates down her spine, and her back feels _wet_ , but she doesn't want to see if she's dripping blood just yet, doesn't want to think of the kind of target that will paint on her, doesn't want to think of a bird whose wing is slowly being ripped away. The timer ticks down, her thudding heart measuring the seconds until a potential horde of undead would moan its way into the garage bays. She stands, wobbling from a wave of painful sensory overload, and listens. The garage echoes with the quieting grunts and snarls of the survivor, or the had-been-survivor, as he either bleeds to death or goes into shock from stab wounds.

Maka nearly falls through the window trying to climb back through it. Glass scrapes her hands, but they're paper cuts to whatever her back is sporting.

The survivor is curled up on the floor, hair slowly turning white, pale eyes darkening to red. A wheezing snarl bubbles up his throat as his teeth begin to turn, angry words on the verge of forming. Maka finds the canvas bag. Gingerly picks it up. Tries to get the coat off the floor but the thought of that much movement forces her to reconsider. Leaves it. And to hell with the vending machine.

She cuts across the thick cords of muscle in the survivor’s neck on her way out, eyes watering when she steps over Grans body and sees the peaceful look on her face.

 _She gave you a wonderful gift,_ she'd said, but Maka wonders what it is. She has just killed a man twice. Does that make him number twenty-eight or twenty-nine? Her heart whispers, _will Soul be thirty?_

She wishes she hadn't heard.

 

 

* * *

 

 

The inside of her left boot squelches with every step. There's a walker tailing her -- she's a block ahead of it, the freeway bridge finally arching overhead, but the walker is gaining. Lucky that it's not a child. Lucky that it's the only one.

Unlucky that she's bleeding into her shoe, half the jars in the canvas bag shattered and leaking, and her hand so weak that it can barely hang on to her knife. Could she take out the zombie in one blow? Maybe. Not really. She should drop the bag and go. She should forget it and kill herself now.

She is too stubborn. She sees the library, and beyond it stands the proud sign of the gentleman's club. Maka's never been so happy to something so gaudy in her life.

If she makes it through the library door, will another zombie be waiting for her? Will she be the last one once again? No -- one thing at a time. A walker is following her, and she is too injured to defend herself, because she is an idiot who hadn't stolen pedo-survivor's gun.

Her head is getting fuzzy, her limbs tingling and numb. It's mid-afternoon, the sun stretching a wobbly, undead shadow at her feet, but she can’t be sure if it’s the walkers or hers. She stumbles across gravel, hobbling her way to _Safe, get there, just fucking get there, hashtag-_ _ **baller,**_ get there before she becomes the bird shot from the sky, still as a boulder, like an Old Crone replacement who only knows one name.

"Soul!" she screams, but to what end, she doesn't know -- he's probably dead or _dead_ , or if he's not he's throwing up or thinking up cheesier one-liners to make her blush or making a nuclear bomb out of vending machine parts and inkjet cartridges, _that fucking nerd, please don't be dead_ \-- **"SOUL!"**

And then a bomb goes off. It deafens her, ears ringing with an explosive whipcrack of sound, the shadow following her melting away.

"I waited," a rasping voice says from the library's roof. Soul props the shotgun at his feet and leans heavily on it, looking on step nine-and-a-half of ten on the stairway to death. "That was... really fucking loud. Hurry up."

He hasn't unlocked the door, so she reaches up for the key, stretching her back and reigniting what had become the mindless throb of her wound, pain shrieking to her toes. She doesn't remember walking in or where her bag of re-stolen-stolen goods has gone. She's just standing next to the attic stairs, teetering, watching Soul catch his breath halfway down.

"I lost your jacket," she says, because it's the only thing she can think of.

In the next moment, he's standing before her, the ladder back in the ceiling. She peers at it, BlackStar's giant arrow pointing skyward, where stars go. "You were limping,” he says. “Where are you hurt? Oh my _shit_ that's blood--"

In the next moment, she's in the bathroom, watching candlelight playing on the shapes of an open bottle of not-ibuprofen spilled in the basin. She leans on the sink and tries to breathe as glass is pried from her skin. She catches a glimpse of him in the mirror looking stricken and _other,_ desperate to help her and desperate to not trip over her on the last step to death. Hunting-cat eyes dilated like empty-socket windows examine the blood oozing down her back. She's topless. How did that happen?

His lips are tightly pressed together. "There's... no--" His burning hands shake against her. "No needle, but--" He keeps stopping mid-sentence, shuddering, and she can't focus long enough to piece it all the fragments together. He does something with first aid tape and floss that forces her skin back together, and slowly covers that with gauze and more tape. He must have a thing for tape. Tape and bondage. She's topless, how did that happen?

Time blinks forward again and she's on the bathroom floor, head resting against sink cabinetry. She feels better sitting down, or maybe that's the numb cotton of narcotics slinking through her chest. Her legs are smashed strangely in the small space, smearing old blood everywhere. Oh, look, her shirt. Not-white and very-red in a puddle next to the toilet altar.

Warm breath fans across her neck. A hand is on her shoulder, fingers flexing. Half her wound is still uncovered, but there's no sounds of tape being peeled and torn to finish the job.

"Soul?"

There's no answer -- no 'speaking', no 'that's me', no 'you can thank me later'. Harsh breathing becomes more so, like lungs riddled with tumors and tar, like lungs giving up the ghost.

"Maka," he says, his nails clenching painfully into her shoulder. The bathroom reverberates with his strangled efforts at sucking in air, and what little of his voice escapes she thinks sounds a bit like weeping.

Maka's hand inches for her hip, a big **30** stamped into her mind in the worst of tallies, but her arm is rubbery and drugged and bloodless. Her fingers fumble for a knife that isn't there. With a nervous glance, she sees it under the shredded gore of her tank top. She reaches, eyes closing, picturing his mouth parting with those piranha-wolf- _other_ fangs peeking out, descending on the still-exposed portion of her wound. Her left hand nudges her shirt off the blade handle.

"Soul," she shakily tries. Kill him, kill him, _kill him,_ she tells her arm, but it ignores her.

One jagged breath is sucked into his mouth, his other hand skimming up around to hold her by the throat. Like reading aloud a language he can pronounce but no longer understand, he hisses, _"There's something in you."_

Warmth touches her, tastes her.

He screams. She's painfully shoved against the cabinet. She reels for a long moment. The knife is in her hand. Soul is gone. Soul is screaming.

His screams echo through the library, howls that have no meaning to her save 'I am dying'. Maka stands, gasping, shivering, wired. She hasn't been bitten -- it's his last favor to her. She moves the knife from her left hand to her right, and follows his calls for her to fulfill a promise.

Once outside the bathroom, she freezes amidst dancing candle flames and darkening daylight. Terror constricts around her. A cacophony of moans comes from every direction, thumps and thuds knocking on all the windows.

Her scream, the gunshot, _whatever_ , had called in The Strip. They come for the buffet, the slaughterhouse, and sing a chorus for one of their own who shrieks between two bookshelves of classic literature.

She wills herself to believe painkillers kill pain, and lets stone grow around her heart as she leans on shelving to get to Soul. He's retching again, spitting a dark plague on the floor as he huddles against a window, tangled in black sheets.

Maka's knife is a simple slicing knife, borrowed indefinitely from Gran. It's narrow, but long, long as her forearm, with a straight-edged gleam honed from hours of sharpening with one of Soul's many miscellaneous survival gadgets. The point watches his throat as Maka waits for him to stop breathing and turn. He must turn. He must turn on her.

Soon, he stops howling and vomiting. All around them, the crowd cries for blood. His breath quietens until she can't hear it anymore.

 

_If I don't remember my name--_

 

"Soul."

His head of snowy hair turns, red eyes dilated and reflecting light. She makes the point of the knife slowly dance, and his eyes follow. She will not cry -- she isn’t the hunting falcon this time. She is only a sparrow missing a wing.

His mouth opens.

"Speaking."

A violent shudder crashes through her. She's hallucinating. She imagined it. _"Soul,"_ she insists, voice wavering, knife moving closer to his neck in threat.

She can’t find her breath when he slowly sits up on his knees, hands held up in surrender.

"S-speaking."

Maka violently shakes her head, refusing this. She trembles, reaching low, knife touching his bared throat. It comes out like a sob. _**"Soul."**_

His chin moves in the barest of nods, wary of cutting himself. His chest moves as he breathes. "Soul Evans, twenty-two. P-Pianoman. You found me in a tree and saved me. You saved me at--" he swallows nervously, twitching at the sounds of the mob banging on the window behind him, "--at the, uh, fountain. It was broken. You saved me a million times. You -- you're Maka Albarn. You can fly in trees. You're _tiny_ and you're scary as hell sometimes and you're sarcastic and you like books and Spaghettios and cats and you never wanna admit you're lonely."

It's the start of day seven. She's known him for a week and realizes he, consequently, has known her for a week as well. Her knife falls away from him, tears escaping her.

"...Also you're topless right now."

The blade sticks into the carpet and she crumples to her knees, sobbing. His hands are hesitant at first, but then sure, gently grasping her arms.

"I didn't-- I didn't infect you, did I?" he asks.

She shakes her head, but it's a lie. He's stolen fire and brought the clay of her heart to life.

 

 

* * *

 

 

"I'm gonna cut it," he tells her. She lays on her good side, thin gauze wrapped around her breasts. He folds a tiny pair of scissors out of the most ridiculous Swiss-army knockoff she's ever seen, and slowly cuts off handfuls of the tangled mass that is her hair.

He's worried the length of it will infect her wound. She thinks it's already inflamed enough that it's probably a moot point, but it'll be nice to get her hair off the back of her sweating neck awhile. She's feverish. She doesn't think it's the virus, but it's an infection nonetheless. Soul's been trying to keep the gash clean, but their supplies are limited. They're out of fever pills, too.

They're not quite out of food yet, but with his staggering appetite, it won't be long. Soul's wrists still look thin and brittle, but his face is beginning to fill in and he looks much more lively, even with the sleepless bags under his eyes. He hasn't puked in two days.

"How are you feeling," she asks as he chops another hunk of her hair away. He agitated from answering this question every three hours, but he obliges her.

"I haven't felt like this since before I was bit," he says. The day before, he'd cut himself on the edge of a stripped wire, and his blood had bled red. "Worry about yourself," he grumbles.

She's cold. He gives her the quilt, but doesn't let it rest on her back. It smells like sweat and half-turned geek. It puts her to sleep.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Most of the banging outside the library has ceased, the mob having slipped into stasis and now camping out until the inevitable grand opening. It'll be soon, she knows, but she tries not to think about it.

They'd been told help would be sent, but bitterness fills her mouth. The others were probably no better than that survivor who'd done this to her -- the one who killed Old Crone, whom Maka had killed in turn. This is probably some kind of justice, she thinks, for her turning on a breather to avenge a zombie.

At least Soul is okay. Her killing spree of men will end at twenty-eight-slash-nine, and her life-saving tally will go up one for reasons she still does not understand (though he'd claimed she had saved him a lot more times than that).

It's day four since he'd called her out on her loneliness. She's dying.

"You're dying," he whispers, fingers clenching against the carpet. "I have to do something."

She groans. “ _No._ Once you leave here, there won't be a way back in. There's hundreds out there."

"I was thinking I'd go to a tower. See if I can get it back online."

 _No,_ she doesn't say, _you're thinking about drawing them away._ "Soul, you'll have to jump into a tree."

He grimaces. "Yeah, that crossed my mind."

"You're afraid of heights."

"Yes, genius, that did not leave with the infection."

"They're not like Old Crone, they're faster."

"I've been bit once, it wasn't so bad."

She growls, frustrated.

"Look, I'll tie you to the desk if I gotta. I'm going."

Maka closes her eyes, willing away the sting that threatens them. Since he'd held her as she cried, her heart has been more obnoxious and emotional than ever. It burns constantly. "You're _not._ You drop crowbars," she argues.

His hand is cool on her cheek; he's the normal one and she's the one on fire this time. "If I don't go, you'll die," he says, and they're back to square one of this argument.

She glares at him, head pounding. "You leave and both of us die."

Soul shakes his head. "I can't sit here and let it happen." He moves her shortened hair out of her face. "I'll find them. I'll bring Prometheus to _you_. Wait for me."

He draws it from her unwilling throat. "I'll wait," she murmurs.

He smiles that half-smile, the friendly smirk, and stands, hitching his backpack on his shoulder. "I'll take you on a date when I get back," he says, pulling down the attic ladder.

Maka blinks, shell-shocked. "Not until you play me a song," she blurts. She blames the fever. At his confused look, she adds, "Pianoman."

"It's 'sing us a song', nerd," he scoffs.

"I don't think I wanna hear you sing."

"You're such a troll." He climbs. "It's a deal," he calls, his feet disappearing into the ceiling. "I won't forget."

Maka hears the hatch open and close, his footsteps creaking across the roof. This is how he'd felt, she realizes, dread pooling in her throat. Like this, but in reverse.

To the library, to the myths of courageous and cowardly people, to the legends of normal men she whispers, _"Be careful."_

 

 

* * *

 

 

She aches everywhere, her pulse so quick and loud in her ears that she's tempted to rip out her own throat for silence. If it's not her heart driving her mad, it's the Old Crone in the bathroom, chirping, chirping, seeing Maka's tears with blind eyes, bashing her skull open to the heart of the matter.

He's bad at gambling. He isn't coming back. She is going to die alone. The third time's the charm, but not the fourth.

She opens a jar of raspberry preserves and it looks so much like the crushed-in skull of Gran's grandchild that it only makes her throw up.

This is how it had been, for him. For days. For weeks. She can't comprehend it. He must truly be made of steel -- she won't last another day. She's so tired of shivering, sore from tensing every muscle in her body for hours. It sounds like her bones are creaking under the stress, or maybe that's the glass under the strain of the walkers that hadn't followed Soul.

Maybe it's the trees, talking to her, claiming her as theirs. _You used us, now we'll use you._

She wishes they would just burn her to ash so her breather-heart would stop screaming.

Because it screams, constantly, never again whispering. It demands she remember her father, the 'big sparrow', the face he'd erased for her sake. It demands she remember Gran, her grandmother of four days and five months, her ghost of always, heartlessly reminding her that she's a person named 'Maka'.

It screams for herself, of what she has become -- a bird with one wing, burned in the stolen fire. Maka Albarn: biker gang crazy bitch; Maka Albarn: tree-climbing idiot-murderer with a shitty taste in music; Maka Albarn: lonely.

She hears a dull pop, and she thinks it’s the sound of her sanity turning just like everything else.

There's bright light searing into her eyes, and _she_ is @Prometheus, punished by the gods for putting life into what was supposed to die. The gods are angry. They demand blood. Hers, heating and cooling, over and over, tempering like a carving knife to stab under arms and in kidneys. Blood to pay for her crimes, to write in red ink the stories of the courageous, craven, average lonely girl and her deeds.

 _Don't scream,_ they say as they write in her blood. Maka Albarn, twenty-five, measurements: 28-slash-9 degrees, 19 minutes, 12 seconds nowhere. The Crone chirps her name as witness. Gran takes her hands, dips them in ink, and holds them for all to see the red.

 

_She can sense you better than most._

 

Don't scream. Not ever. Not for anything. _Because your mother gave you a wonderful gift,_ the Crone says, spreading Maka's hands across Las Vegas: City of Death, smearing it with a glaze of red over black.

 

_There's something in you._


	2. Stole over the celestial kind

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No sexual content in this chapter. Additional warnings for Maka's narcotic problem and Black Star's -mouth- problem.

 

 

 

 

 

She wakes in a place she's never seen. There is no sign of the Old Crone, Vegas, or her knife. It smells like earth and stone and water, but she is not in any tree. She listens, but her ears feel woolen; all she can hear is a droning, heavy hum that seems to emanate from every direction.

Carefully, Maka sits up from a folding cot into a dream world. It must be a dream, because electricity doesn't exist in reality anymore, and the fluorescent lights here are making her squint. She runs through cautious self-evaluation, lifting an arm that feels both delayed and overcompensated. Dream limbs never do respond well.

She wears a shirt that's too big -- more like a dress than anything -- but it's soft and clean and only one color. She has no knife.

"Hello."

Determined to not make any sudden movements, Maka slowly, slowly turns her head to see a woman on the other side of the humming room.

The stranger has short-cropped hair, the dark color doing funny things in the light that Maka doesn't believe is allowed within the known boundaries of the color spectrum. Her eyes aren't red, but they're not _normal_ either: a lilac-but-not, like fabled dragon scales or the shadows under iridescent, membranous wings. Instinct says to not trust any of those colors until the woman speaks complete sentences, dreamworld or not.

She has no knife. She needs her knife. "What are you," Maka croaks.

"I don't know anymore." The response is frank, like the resulting conclusion of many hours of searching; an answer that has been reached hundreds of times. Maka wonders if that's the answer she'll always be given when she asks that question. "I am ShadowStag. My name is Tsubaki. You're safe here."

She'll be the judge of that. "Just like that library was 'safe'?" Maka accuses. She gets a glimpse of teeth that are flat and straight and kind of irritatingly perfect. Model teeth.

"A bit better than that. The library was one of our first havens, my apologies."

Maka takes a good look at ‘ShadowStag’, eyeing the shotgun strap cutting between the swell of her breasts. And then she remembers.

"You were _bitten,"_ she blurts, head spinning, dream-drugged hand itching for a weapon.

"I was," Tsubaki tonelessly agrees. "Stein's antidote reverses the more pertinent aspects of the infection, but... most of the lingering effects are purely cosmetic," she offers, scratching the side of her face.

Maka is leery of what doesn't fall under the category of 'most of', unsure how long she has left to live in this dream.

"If you are uncomfortable with me, I can send in Black Star, though I wouldn't recommend it."

She exchanges a wary glance with the woman. "...Why."

Tsubaki looks away for a brief moment. "He's, um. Kind of taxing. On a person's sanity."

"Baller."

"Hm?"

She never could control her mouth in dreams. "Nevermind. I'm just... What do you mean, _'antidote'?"_

"He's still working the kinks out of it. I'm the closest to pre-infection that has survived the injection." Without intonation, she adds, "It's only for the resistant. It doesn't work on dead people."

No, nothing works on dead people. Nothing but bullets and knives. Tsubaki continues her explanation, but Maka tunes her out, her heart stirring with a sleepy, drowsy rage that dances away when she tries to stoke it to life. An antidote existed for people like Soul.

She was supposed to take him to Prometheus, but he had brought Prometheus to her, instead. Maka shivers. Time to find out what kind of dream this is.

"Where is Soul."

ShadowStag tilts her head, the light doing hypnotic things in her hair. "Soul?" she asks, confused.

Her heart sinks. "Name, not object. He's my--" He's _what?_ What is he? Personal geek squad? "Partner. He was taking care of me, I--"

"Pianoman?"

Maka's breath noisily whooshes out of her. " _Yes_. Yes, Pianoman."

"He... We haven't met him," Tsubaki admits, eyebrows crinkling.

He's dead. It's a nightmare. Her heart ignites, softly wailing. She should've figured.

Tsubaki presses something hooked to the collar of her shirt, carefully keeping her movements non-aggressive. "Black Star," she says.

An electronic voice crackles loudly in the room, making Maka jolt. _"Yo. Tsubaki."_

"When was the last update from Pianoman?"

A static-filled sigh echoes back. _"That squirrely dick. Hang on, uhhhh -- three hours ago. Why?"_

Tsubaki doesn't answer, but her dream-lilac eyes watch Maka expectantly.

 

_Wait for me._

 

* * *

 

 

"You're the accidental partner, right? Easy, I'm not bitten or anything. We raided a Walgreens and I happen to like blue. Chill out."

"Who are you," she demands when she meets the man behind BlackStar, hashtag-baller.

"Black Star."

"I mean your name."

"Black Star, I said! Who the fuck are you?"

Lonely. "Maka Albarn," she says, and then punches him in the face.

She's restrained by Tsubaki, whose presence still makes the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end, and Black Star reels in his seat, swearing into his hands.

 _"Who the fuck punches a god in a wheelchair?!"_ he shouts, pulling his fingers away and examining his own blood.

"Where the hell were you?!" Maka screeches, her throat unused to such demanding abuse. "You sent us to that shit hole and we **waited for you!"**

"Calm your non-existent tits! I don't have to explain shit to you. _God damn_." Black Star wipes his blood on his shirt. He says to Tsubaki over Maka's shoulder, "I thought she was drugged up."

"She _is,"_ the woman insists. More quietly, she says, "I told you I didn't recommend seeing him right now."

Black Star curses again, still gingerly touching his nose. "I'm gonna have to see Stein later. _I hate seeing that lunatic._ If you're done being psychotic, I'm about to eat. Are you gonna chill, or not?"

 

* * *

 

 

She's given a bowl of clear, almost-broth, which tastes like vaguely chicken-flavored salt water.

Black Star is a stocky thing, with defined shoulders and biceps. He looks steel-filled, but instead of limber, tree-climbing bear, he'd been cast in compact monkey: lethal and exuberant all at once. He also looks kind of like a jackass, but Maka had expected that.

She hadn't expected the leg missing from his right knee, down. She notes several foot-shaped prostheses scattered about the room, all in various states of questionable, experimental nerd-surgery.

Black Star wheels around in his chair, surrounded by a bank of lashed-together monitors, most of which without their shells. Cables are tangled and massed together on his desk, collected into some unnamed techno-serpent. She thinks he and Soul could go to geek squad camp and have a summer fling together.

He has a tissue lodged up one nostril, but it doesn't affect his ability to eat and work at the same time. Maka sips her broth and keeps her eyes peeled for exits. She's not comfortable here, in this dark room with darker corners, with Tsubaki's shadow-bending hair atop an all-too-still body lurking in her peripheral, mythic eyes watching just in case Maka decides to start swinging again.

If Black Star notices her unease, he does not appear to give a shit. "I seen your back. Walkers?"

A shudder runs through her as she flows backwards through dusty, fevered memories, back to the grocery, to old tomatoes and ghost bullets. "I don't like you," she says. "I want my knife."

"A god doesn't need likes, he needs follows. And you can't have it. Stein's still doing mad scientist shit with it." He pops open a can of what has to be an expired energy drink and chugs. "Just answer me already."

The only exits from this room are the door she'd been led through, guarded by Tsubaki, and a giant window overlooking the very unfriendly drop off of Hoover Dam lit only by stars. She feels caged. She answers, if only to get out of this room and find 'Stein' and her knife, and perhaps gutting him for keeping it from her.

"Another survivor. He knocked me through a window."

"Who is 'he'?"

Maka gives him a dry look. "I didn't think to ask his name. He had a gun on my neck."

Black Star’s face darkens. "What kind of gun." When she doesn't respond, glancing out the window again instead, he says, "Look, I need to know if any of my people are tryin' to kill shit that ain't dead yet. _What kind. Of gun._ "

She swallows an exasperated growl. "I don't know. A pistol with a clip. Silencer." Ghost bullets, to kill ghosts.

Black Star shares a look with Tsubaki, who placidly blinks back. "What'd he look like?"

"It doesn't matter," Maka says listlessly. "I stabbed him in the kidney."

"He... sounds pretty dead."

"Twice over." Just like Gran. She feels sick. "Can I go now?"

He crushes his can and rolls away, his hands delving into the tangled serpent of cables. "Tell me about Pianoman. He was bitten?"

She sighs, but remembers why she'd wanted to meet this jackass in the first place. "Yes."

"You saw it."

Can't she just fill out a witness statement and be done with all these self-explanatory questions? "I saw the wound on his arm." She takes another sip of broth, the warmth of it surreal and dreamlike. When had been the last time she'd eaten anything cooked? "I met him either nine or ten days after he'd been bitten."

 _"Shit,"_ he remarks.

The broth wears away the rust. "He didn't eat much. Had a fever. He told me about you and Prometheus." And she'd given in to hope, to find more breathers, to protect someone else. She doesn't feel like she's accomplished anything, though all the boxes on the checklist have been marked.

Black Star stops stripping wires and levels her with a serious expression. "Did he turn at any point," he asks. "He's been avoiding us, but stays in contact. Is he dangerous?"

She watches oil swirl in her broth. Energy. She sips. "He looks like one. He even kind of... _sees_ like them. But--" Maka closes her eyes, recalling the dim shape of the creature he had turned into after he'd spared her, the darkness spilling from his mouth. "--he's cured, somehow. His blood is red. He took care of me, when I... when _this_ ," she gestures bitterly to her shoulder.

"He just got better," Black Star says, skeptical.

She slowly shakes her head. It's hard for her to relay the story properly, wanting to skip over the terror she'd felt, of her denial, of how, until he'd spared her, she hadn't had the courage to kill him in the bathroom.

"He... **licked** you?" The man makes a sour face.

Tsubaki asks from the doorway, "Were you bitten?"

"No." She's quietly kind of proud about it. "He pushed me away."

Both their gazes prompt her to keep going. "I thought he was dying. I think _he_ thought he was dying. I was going to kill him. He was being sick everywhere, and I was... going to kill him." Maka swallows thickly. "But he responded to his name. And told me things only he and I would know."

"But he looks like one," Black Star states.

"But he looks like one," she echoes.

He tosses his cables carelessly to his work station, sighing. "That _idiot_. Half of us have looked like one at some point or another." He says to Tsubaki, "We gotta bring him in, he's gonna fuck up eventually by himself."

Maka breathes, lightheaded. "Can I..." she whispers.

"What?"

"Can I respond? To him." She can't stop her shivering. She needs to see him. She needs to confirm this reality.

 

_I'll bring Prometheus to_ _**you.** _

 

Black Star scoffs, smiling like a gibbon. "Yeah. Want your own name?"

 

* * *

 

 

 _#Resistance_ has become a thing all on its own, and the base of operations at Hoover Dam is a Mount Olympus of blood experiments and self-proclaimed gods. They’re a menagerie of courage, cowardice, and... _Tsubakis_.

ShadowStag had been the latest in a small line of the cured. All of them tend to keep to themselves, as the rescued civilians and survivors are nervous around them.

The civs are nervous around Maka too, but she thinks that the Old Crone had showed them her red hands. The cured are wary of her as well, but only after she'd been caught in the tourist gift shop-turned-kitchen, filching a carving knife on the first night she'd been moved to the visitor's center where everyone sleeps. She'd seen twin children moving in the shadows, their razor smiles making her panic. Later she'd learned they were Claire and Castor, a pair of the cured.

She still itches to slice their throats when she sees them, but restrains the reflex. The knife had been taken away from her, anyway.

She's always suffocating in the breather mob, so she frequently finds herself outside, wandering viewing decks and massive bridges, taking in the sights of the world that was, or still kind-of _is,_ here. Sweeping power lines span sheer rock faces like cobwebs. Tsubaki had told her there are still animals out there, farther into Arizona and away from the large cities. Sometimes, birds fly overhead. She's envious.

Maka sits on a ledge, feet dangling over the long drop to the Colorado River, and refreshes her smartphone. She thinks it strange to have finally become one of _those_ people, long after the apocalypse, who must stare at a screen every five minutes or feel lost without it. She lurks around the phone, keeps it faithfully charged, and continually has her faith shattered in five minute intervals.

 

_**@Pianoman** I waited. #hurryup_

 

He hasn't responded to anyone in two days. She's been told this isn't his longest silence, but Black Star and Tsubaki frequently make those annoying, unreadable glances at each other, which Black Star comes away from with a deeper scowl every time.

The phone is nicer than any phone Maka had ever owned, and yet still holds that artifact vibe. Alien technology. Touchscreen Stonehenge. A druidic device that delivers dreams, maybe. Maka munches from a jar of pickles she'd stolen when Sid Barett (a first-gen cured, who came out looking worse than when he'd started) wasn't watching. She refreshes the twitter feed again.

 

_**@Littlesparrow** Had to find another jacket #mybad_

 

She stares. Her heart screams, pushing fire into her eyes.

 

* * *

 

 

She doesn't dream of the Old Crone, if only because she's afraid of falling asleep and seeing her. She does inevitably doze, though, with little cat naps in the kitchen or nestled behind giant generators. And though Gran never appears, her mind sometimes conjures a black map dotted with little runways of streetlights and neon, casinos and resorts all faintly squirming with a skin of restless corpses.

She wakes in the dead of night, Sid nudging her bare foot with a combat boot. His hand is wrapped around her wrist before she realizes she had even tried to strike him. He sighs, air whistling through the holes in his face.

"What's the point of having your own room if you never use it?" he says. He'd been the one to convince Black Star that she needed to be separated from the rest of the survivors, just in case she decides to lessen their number. He helps her to her feet, and the world twists dizzily away from her. "I know there's electrolytes in pickle juice, Albarn, but you can't live off it. Let's go."

She's led around platoons of inflatable beds and bulging sleeping bags, and into a small, cozy room with a glass door that has been covered by a curtain, because most everyone has a tendency to panic when they see Sid Barett in his office.

Maka has learned that this man is truly the brains behind the resistance. He advises; Black Star carries out. He'd been some kind of army-type in the old world, intelligent and wired for war tactics. Out of a desk drawer, he pulls out two silvery, heavy envelopes and hands one to her.

"Jerky," he says, though he doesn't mention _what kind._ He turns on a lamp and studies the large tourist map unfolded on his desk, adding to little colored blobs with highlighters.

She absently watches the cured man masticate whatever it is that he claims is food, recently raided from an army-surplus. It's like watching an in-depth documentary, conveniently without the aid of x-rays and cross-sections.   
Maka sits, packet of jerky in hand, and wonders what planet she's on. She's constantly irritated, the world permanently in a fog of pain meds as her back slowly knits itself together. She’s suspecting she may be stuck in a dream after all, or has been communicating with nerd-ghosts trapped in cell towers and techno matrices who respond to her messages but never show up, and maybe everything is just a big woolen joke being pulled over her eyes.

"Is this real?" she blurts. "These people. This life."

Sid's eyes (they'd managed to revert to a pale, relatively human blue, as if to make up for the rest of him going awry) gauge her for a moment, and he swallows. He tears into another strip of dehydrated-whatever. "As real as shit after morning coffee," he responds. "Whether this is hell, or we're all dreamin', or I'm a figment of someone else's sick sense of humor, I'm the kind of person that fights to live." He swallows again, his highlighter squeaking along the faded blue squiggle of the Colorado River. "What kind are you?"

Courageous, craven, normal. None of the above. She eats her mystery protein, both parts relieved and alarmed that it has no distinguishing flavor. Maka gives him the Universal Answer. "I don't know. I feel trapped. My plan had always been 'survive, survive', but I don't know to what end. And now, I'm here, using... cell phones and toilets and _soap._ And I have no plan, anymore."

"Your _plan_ is to get well," Sid says, writing something on a tiny post-it and sticking it somewhere in the vicinity of Paradise. He then scowls meaningfully at her, or tries to -- he doesn't have much in the way of lips. "You're no help to anyone eatin' pickles and drugged up to the bleedin' moon all day."

Maka watches his capped highlighter bobbing as he idly taps the map. She knows what he’s saying is right, but there’s something in her and it wants _out._

He says, "You say you're trapped, but what of them?" Sid points at the center of Vegas, where the entire city has been colored in with highlighter. "Thousands of souls, Albarn. _Millions_ all over the world, trapped in their corpses, stuck in god-forsaken limbo. The Reaper's late. Hell, maybe he turned, too."

Old Crone’s unmoving, red eyes come to her then, peaceful and staring into the abyss, two bullet holes decorating her forehead like jewels.

The silver envelope crinkles in her hands as Maka realizes what shames her most about it all -- not that she'd murdered a living, breathing man, but the fact that a shitbag pedophile, his hand still on her _tit_ , had been able to do in half a second what she had not, finally putting Gran out of her undead misery five months after having her throat ripped out.

 

* * *

 

 

In her little folding cot, she stares at the glow of her phone. The painkillers are wearing off, and her heart beats too loudly, too vulnerably in the dark. In a fit of madness, or maybe normalness, she types out a message.

 

 _ **@Pianoman**_ _We had a deal._

 

The tweet publishes, and she sees it at the top of the feed. Her lungs clench in panic, and she deletes it a minute later. She refreshes to make sure it's gone and sees something in its place.

 

_**@Littlesparrow** I didn’t forget_

 

She drops the phone on her face. He must be looking at his phone _right now,_ as she is. Another message appears a minute later.

 

_**@Littlesparrow** Will be there tomorrow #wait_

 

Maka frantically smothers herself with the quilt they'd taken from the library. She's twenty-five going on sixteen; a nervous girl at the end of the world.

 

* * *

 

 

She slowly learns what 'tomorrow' doesn't mean over the course of the day. She eats breakfast in her room, refusing to look at her phone, because looking at it would makes her even more anxious.

She walks across a small bridge to Doctor Stein's lab -- as she's done every morning -- to demand her knife be returned. She is turned away as usual.

She watches Sid and Black Star engage in resistance-zombie Risk, debating over that highlighted map which places to raid would be best for the week.

Tsubaki convinces her to eat lunch together. Another cured joins them, Jacqueline, who seems pleasant enough if not a little terse. Regardless, she gives Maka the creeps. The woman's hair is black, but so light and wispy that it's like a dye-job on a turned, a black avalanche of shadow that moves with every whispering breeze. Her eyes are just as dark, like empty, unobstructed portals to the underworld, where a faint red fire still gleams in direct light. Jacqueline reports supplies running low, and Tsubaki promises to relay the information to Black Star before the next raid.

After lunch, Maka returns to Stein's lab, only to be turned away again by the guard. Harvey might be another of the cured, but she can't be certain because the man won't take his sunglasses off for anything.

"I'll tell him you visited," he says curtly. "Just as always. Now go away."

She's so restless that she finds herself back in Black Star's land of endless flatscreen glow, plaintively asking for something, anything, to do. He teaches her to terminate network cables with little plastic plugs, or rather shoves the materials in her face and expects her to figure it out for herself as long as she's out of his face. She does this until her mind goes numb, eventually settling for watching him monitor his monitors.

Macros auto-refresh various twitter feeds, screens spew back lines of code she doesn't understand, and eight thousand-too many windows are open with multiple programs she thinks are probably home-grown.

"Your Pianoman's been hookin’ up towers faster than we can tell him where to look," Black Star divulges as he attempts to turn one of his prosthetic legs into a wireless access point. Maka watches little blinking dots slowly move across a hijacked version of Google Maps. "He's helped us with triangulation, so now I can watch all our raiders."

She doesn't know what that means, precisely, but wonders if one of those blinking dots is Soul. Tsubaki interrupts her thoughts, bringing in the pills she'd forgotten to take at lunch. They hit her like a truck, and Maka naps behind a rack of whispering servers.

Later, she groggily drinks warm tea, seated against the bank of windows of the tourist center/community sleeping room, trying to warm her sluggish blood in the afternoon sun. Like a reptile, she thinks, but birds are endothermic, so she thinks she might be broken.

The reflex to check her phone is strong, but she'd left it in her room to thwart sixteen-year-old weakness. She waits. Occasionally, a truck or armored van will drive into the facility, and she watches them unload supplies or survivors or the rare resistant.

It's been four weeks since she had met him in that tree -- she's been at Hoover Dam for longer than she'd been with him in the valley. She shouldn’t feel like this. Her heart refuses to see the logic, however, and continues to noisily make itself known.

Maka sips her tea as her eyes follow a motorcycle driving across the bridge. _Biker gang crazy bitch,_ her brain supplies uselessly before recognizing the bulky backpack on the driver. She stands, head swimming, and hurries to the security check where all #Resistance must go through before coming home.

Her feet slap on cool pavement, making her way through the small crowd of breathers she hasn't cared to speak with. She's too short and can't see over everyone, only catching a glimpse of him between gaps of shoulders: _He's at gunpoint._ Maka fiercely shoves her way between two people, desperate to keep him from being marked as turned, but by the time she makes it to the front of the crowd, he's already walking freely, somewhat lost, towards the front doors.

He opens the door and she doesn't scream, only mouthing his name when his eyes land on her. He's filthy and _alive_ , and her heart wells up, unable to keep her face from smiling.

Soul glances nervously around at all the nervously murmuring breathers before his focus is drawn back to her. He looks dazed, somewhat, stride faltering, and she worries if he isn't cured after all, but the corner of his mouth twitches with a smirk. He stands before her, his hands outstretched for a moment before falling awkwardly at his sides.

"Maka."

It's not a dream.

He smells horrendous and she tugs him by his new jacket and embraces him. His arms wrap around her, a hand holding her head to his chest as he surrounds her with himself. She says, "You jumped off the roof for me."

"God," he murmurs against her hair. "It fucking hurt like hell, too."

"I thought I'd never see you again."

"Sorry. I missed you. I missed your stupid freckles. Are you okay? Is this hurting you?"

She shakes her head against him. She'll have to bathe later. "No, I'm so high right now I don't care."

He lightens up his hug, just in case. His mouth brushes near her ear. "That explains the smile, then," he laughs. "Never seen that before."

"Well I'm happy," she mumbles, indignant.

 _"You're pretty."_ He pulls away, fearsome grin stretching across his face as he admires her blush. People are staring.

It's then that ShadowStag finds them and introduces herself and would he please follow her to see Doctor Stein? And once he's over the shock of seeing Tsubaki (he hadn't known she was a woman, or _alive_ ) Soul turns back to Maka. His fingers are splayed on her wrist, holding her smaller hand in his large palm. "I'll find you," he promises, his eyes imploring her to remember another one, as if she'd forgotten.

 

* * *

 

 

She dangles her feet off the bridge, glowering at the darkening sky. Two minutes through the front door and he already has an audience with the resident scientist. She's been here two weeks and she's been turned away every time! Though Stein must have seen her when she'd been rescued, she was unconscious, and she doesn't want that to count, even if he _had_ saved her life.

She supposes she's not anyone important -- she's not resistant. But she thinks she's something else, and she can't shake the image of her blood streaking across neon lights.

Footsteps sound behind her, and her hand instantly darts to a knife that isn’t there. The steps halt for a moment before starting again, cautious and familiar. Maka hadn't known she'd committed that much of him to memory in so little time together.

"I'm surprised you're this close to the edge," she tells Hoover Dam.

"...Thanks for noticing. Any closer and I may just piss myself."

Maka swivels around on the barrier, her feet dangling a few inches from the bridge. She finds Soul in a low squat, arms casually draped over his legs. He looks almost as pale as his hair, and she slides off the barrier, apologetic. He seems to breathe more easily once her feet are planted.

His eyes are dilated in the twilight, drinking her up.

"Guess this is the worst place to set up base for a person like you, huh?" she says.

He shrugs a little. "Could be worse. Least it's not that UFO-on-a-stick Stratosphere," he offers, still looking inclined to nail himself to the ground just in case the wind knocks him off.

Maka crouches in front of him and peers at him curiously. He's in clean clothes, missing his jacket and backpack and crowbar and twenty layers of filth. "I've never seen you so clean."

"Pfft. Me neither. There's showers, here. It was--" he's distracted mid-sentence when she rubs a hand in his fluffy hair. "--crazy. What're you dooooing," he complains, letting her knock his head around.

He's so _different,_ tired but stronger than she'd last seen him, a vast change from the withered thing he'd become during his infection. She wonders if she's different to him, too. If he'd really missed her freckles. If his eyes had really just shot down the collar of her shirt for a split second.

 

_I won't forget._

 

Maka's fingers suddenly clench the roots of his hair and those eyes are on hers in an instant, feral and alert and maybe as hungry as hers, and she puts her mouth on his, her tongue stinging on the edges of his teeth. He rocks forward to the concrete, on his knees and holding her head in his hands and it's all warmth like before, wet and tempting, tasting her, tasting her, tasting her.

 _What is this,_ she wonders? She doesn't know him, she's only seen him at his weakest. He doesn't know her, he's only gambled his life to keep her alive. They met in a tree and everything had been a risk, a liability, a potential hazard, but his wrists are filling out and his voice isn't so hoarse from coughing and his mouth is chapped but so insistent and pleading and necessary.

They're bound, like two sides of a blade, tempered in the fire and ringing with life against the anvil of living.

He kisses her, then says, "Can we... not be on this bridge right now?"

She takes him to her room, and he kisses her more. He kisses her mouth, her face, her neck. He kisses her like each press of his mouth is a secret, a story with words that can't be spoken aloud because they don't yet exist, because myths are written after the fact.

Her hands slide under his shirt and his fingers splay across the base of her spine, and three succinct knocks on the door make them both tense and freeze.

The voice on the other side of the door belongs to Harvey. "Albarn. The doctor will see you now."

Maka squints, baring her teeth in a snarl the other man can't see. _Now?_ Two weeks and now Stein decides is a good time?

To her silence, Harvey says, "Are you coming or not. You're not the only person waiting to see him."

"Just! Gimme a... minute. Urgh." Maka exchanges disgruntled glances with Soul, who appears to be at a loss for words. His hands press her closer to his body for a moment before falling away. She reluctantly pulls her hands out of his shirt.

Flustered and straightening her clothes, she says, "Wait for me."

He presses his lips in a tight line and nods. "Careful down there," he says, as if he hadn't just been grinding their hips together. "He's got some... weird shit," he warns, but doesn't elaborate.

 

* * *

 

 

"Miss Albarn. You've survived," Doctor Stein says, greyish hair wiggling as he speaks. He leans over a table, face glued to the eyepiece of a gigantic microscope.

Having nothing to say to this, Maka ignores him, walking away from his worktable and busying herself with the rest of the lab. The well-lit, sterile environment is completely organized and set in a way that appears to revolve around his latest patient in the center of the room. A blonde woman in heavy irons stands behind heavier bars. Her eyes are multicolored, one red, one gold.

She's very polite. "Hello, please excuse me for not greeting you properly. I'm afraid I'm not feeling myself. Call me Marie."

"How's your eye," Stein says from across the room.

"It's painful," she says cheerfully. "Like everything else was."

"Good," the doctor says to the microscope. "It may yet return to normal, or at least match the other one. Your blood still shows signs of infection, but they are decreasing. I suspect you'll be out within thirty-six hours."

"That's wonderful news," Marie says behind bars. "You haven't eaten today, Doctor."

"So you've mentioned."

"I will be glad to keep you on schedule once I’m well again."

"I have no doubt. Miss Albarn, your knife." _This_ gets Maka’s full attention. The man waves an arm in the general direction of an overloaded card table, where her blade's handle sticks out from a pristine towel. "I imagine you will feel more inclined to speak with that in your possession. We have much to discuss."

She moves slowly, fluidly, the soundless owl in flight as to not draw attention, but she remembers her primary feathers have been clipped, and she can’t escape their eyes. Her skin crawls.

Gran's knife is sparkling and unfamiliar without its layers of blood. She can't help but state the obvious. "It's _clean."_

"It has been sterilized. I pray you don't need to ask why." Maka closes her eyes and feels the comforting weight of the knife in her hand. "It's unfortunate you were assaulted by a human, but please refrain from attacking my peers, if you would. I assure you the man with the gun was not one of ours."

"How would you know," she says, voice flat.

Stein twists a loud knob on the microscope, each click echoing like a gunshot. "I _know._ I had a team sweep the area after I spoke with Evans. Also, there was an obvious trail of blood leading from the library. They found your man. And his gun. And something interesting."

Gran. Her back aches thinking about it. She realizes she's forgotten to take her evening medicine. "...What."

 _"Bodies,"_ he says, finally looking up from his microscope. He's one of _them_ , she realizes. His eyes are a cold, unnatural gray, his face marred with scars like a failed experiment. Cured -- or at least uninfected, as 'cured' seems like a relative term around here.

He is mad. Where Gran had been the quintessential example of grandmothers everywhere, this man is the mad scientist that all others are molded from. "All along your blood, Miss Albarn. Every corpse very dead."

Doctor Stein stares at her with intense fascination, and her rapidly speeding pulse begins to throb in the long line etched on her back. She feels too small for this, too compromised to contain such an idea in her head.

"There's something in me," she murmurs. A fire.

"Is there?" says Prometheus, eyes gleaming in dream-fluorescence.

Maka walks to his worktable, standing next to his microscope. She takes her knife and nicks the edge of one finger, holding it out to him as blood beads on the tip. Stein reaches for clean plates for the microscope, but she interrupts him. "No. That one," she says, pointing at the one already under the lens.

He holds the plate up for her, muttering things like 'protocol' and 'biohazard', but allows her to drip one drop of blood on Marie's infected sample. Like held over a fire, it _boils._

Maka watches it, transfixed, imagining the reaction in Soul's body and how it must have ripped him apart; made him scream.

"Marie," Stein says suddenly, voice authoritative and full of warning.

Maka looks back at the caged woman, whose sharp, red and gold lantern eyes pierce into her. Marie’s hands squeal on the bars, trying to strangle them to dust. Her breathing comes in rattles and wheezes.

 _"I am not myself,"_ she rasps.

Stein looks at Maka, his eyes pressing her together like two glass plates, shoving her under a microscope.

 

* * *

 

 

Her back throbs and her ears still ring with Marie's high-pitched screaming. She'd brought Stein's medical license into question multiple times, especially after having so much of her blood drawn for 'future experimentation'. She's exhausted, adrenaline having abandoned her, and kind of ridiculously light-headed. He'd offered her a cot in his lab to sleep on, but she does not want to sleep in the den of a lunatic.

Harvey escorts her to her room. He insists it's so she 'doesn't get lost in the dark', even though she knows full well where she's going, but once she's halfway across the bridge she's grudgingly grateful for his hand steadying her at the elbow. He's like a flight attendant, leading her to her seat during rocky turbulence.

She does feel like she's flying, a little. Sliding along in the air, too high for any human to be, gliding with artificial flight. And the cabin pressure has been lost and she's a few minutes away from shoving her head between her knees while the world spins out of control.

Harvey’s never the conversationalist, and she's grateful for the silence. When they arrive, Sid is talking to a stiff, cornered-looking Soul, who is wearing that look that says 'I'm trying really hard not to freak out', his hand grasping for a crowbar this is still quarantined in Stein's lab, pupils blown wide and hollow. She wonders if this is what she looks like when anyone talks to her.

Sid hands him a navy bag of menagerie-provided, standard-issue Stuff To Live On. It looks heavy. "Take it from a man who knows what it's like to be mistaken for something else," Sid says, and Soul finally relaxes the slightest bit.

Next to her, Harvey moves his hand away from his gun holster. He gives Maka a look that is one hundred percent sunglasses, then leaves her in the hallway.

"Albarn," Sid says when he sees her. "You're sharing a room."

Maka exchanges a glance with Soul, who also does not seem to know what the proper reaction is needed, here. She supposes since she'd recently made out like a desperate teenager with her new roommate, she's not terribly distraught about it. She's still more focused on how he looks like he did when she'd found him in the tree, panicking over Old Crone. "Aye, aye, captain," she flatlines, which Sid tries to frown at.

"'Major', Albarn," he corrects, standing a little straighter. "Take your meds and stop stealing pickles," he says as he lumbers down the corridor.

Soul keeps a wary eye on him until the cured man is out of sight. "I waited," he says, turning to her. "Sort of."

Maka walks into the room and keeps her steps small and soft, though the motion still makes her injury ache. "Sorry I took so long." She makes her way to a table with orange bottles which have names that aren't hers printed on them. Dead peoples' prescriptions. She takes her dosage and swallows it dry.

"I went… sightseeing a little,” he admits, entering the room and closing the door behind him. “But I came back to hide out. It's like that guy said -- everyone looked like they were imagining ways to kill me."

"They probably were." She had, when she'd first met him. And for many days thereafter.

The anxiety in his voice lessens with the door shut, though it's replaced by worry for her. His fingers lightly graze the gauze taped to the crook of her elbow. "What happened with Prometheus?" He finds more gauze on her finger, as well as the hand-shaped bruises and claw marks on her forearm. "You look like shit."

Maka dully nods, because 'like shit' is an accurate description. "I cured Marie," she says, watching Soul's face as he takes in her meaning. He visibly swallows.

"Did she..."

"She's alive."

He shakes his head. "No, did she _get you?"_

Maka blinks. Oh. "I'm fine. Stein wanted blood samples."

Soul looks like he wants to touch her, to feel her bruises or maybe just skin on skin contact, and she thinks she wants that too, but neither of them do anything. "What'd you win?" she asks, indicating the bag.

His care package includes clothes that are too big for him, too. There are also multiple hotel soaps, a toothbrush, individually wrapped sanitation wipes, a curious pair of children's sunglasses, a little plastic black machine with a power cable neither of them recognize, and a goldmine.

"Aw _hell_ yes," he says, the sunglasses perching in his hair like a fashion statement. He pulls out a heavy, compact cube that smells of rubber. "Guess who just got a camping bed. _This guy."_

The machine is an air pump. She has to fold up the cot to make space in the small room for the inflating mattress. Soul stares at growing bed like it's an endangered species.

Maka stands awkwardly to the side, the quilt bundled in her arms. Soul eyes the bed, eyes the quilt, eyes her.

"You're sharing," she tells him.

"I like sharing," replies, both eager and somewhat perverse. "Take off your knife, though. If you pop it..."

Maka reluctantly parts with the knife, but gives him a warning look. "Or _what?"_

He grins, looking ridiculous with the sunglasses. "I don't think we'd both fit on that cot, just sayin'." Maka throws the quilt at his face. "Unless we like, stacked on each other, which I'm for if you're for. You can even be on top."

She doesn't know how she still has enough blood in her body to blush. They both reverently ease onto the mattress, their bodies tilting towards each other in the middle. Her hair pops with static on the surface. His feet hang off the end. Their arms rest against each other as they stare at the ceiling.

"This is wayyy better than a treeee," he exhales in a long mantra. "Or a cell tower."

She's already yawning, heavy with a fog of dead-peoples'-meds. "You slept on towers?”

His arm pressed against hers raises, fingers crooked for emphasis. "'Slept'." He buries it eagerly back next to her, arm hairs tickling. "More like: I continually woke up from falling dreams every ten minutes."

"I'm surprised you're still afraid of heights."

He swears under his breath. "If anything, I think it got worse." He takes the sunglasses off his head and they clatter on the concrete floor. Maka turns to look and finds him studying her face. "As much as I... wanna continue from earlier," he murmurs, "I'm just gonna kiss you once."

It's a very pleasant kiss that makes her lips tingle afterward. Soul covers them both with the quilt. Something about the domesticity of this helps solidify her mind that had been, up until now, wandering aimlessly with no direction.

She tells him, "I thought you were dead." He says nothing, the backs of his knuckles nudging her hand under the quilt. "I thought I died. I thought I was dreaming. I thought this was all one last hallucination."

"I'm sorry."

"I thought your replies were something I made up, or you were a ghost in the machine. Or-"

"Maka."

She takes a deep breath. "Speaking."

"I'm real."

"I don't care if you're real or not," she says. "I don't care if this world is real or not. Whatever it is, it's _broken_." Her voice becomes a whisper, her plan forming with every word, the memory of Marie's screams a backdrop to her strengthening resolution. Her fingers lace through his and tighten. "I will fight to fix it. And I will keep it."

Because it's the world where she'd found him in a tree.

 

* * *

 

 

Soul wakes several times in the night, forgetful of where he is and twitching at every stray sound. Maka also wakes several times, unused to the warmth of someone else. Once, she wakes to find him gone, but the door opens and he walks in before the tendrils of panic can fully clutch her heart.

"Had to piss. Move over, hog."

Maka groans and rolls on her good side, and he slides in behind her. His arm slowly curves around her body. "Is this okay?" he asks against her neck, and she makes a noise in the back of her throat before she falls asleep again.

They wake in the same position when the door opens and smashes into the end of the mattress. Her knife is in her hand before she knows who she's threatening: Black Star boredly observes her, standing with his prosthesis.

"Rise and shine, shits. Breakfast was like two hours ago. Wake the fuck up." He glances over Soul and how his legs are tangled with Maka's. He scoffs, walking down the hallway and leaving the door open. _"Your PTSD is showing,"_ he calls.

Maka growls, carefully replacing her knife back on the floor. Everything hurts, she's hungry, and she thinks she might be addicted to painkillers. Soul's voice makes her brain vibrate.

"Who the fuck was-" he starts to say before rubbing his face with the heels of his hands. "Did I just see water-cooling on his _leg?"_

"And a Monster," she croaks. "He likes them refrigerated."

The bed bounces her around when Soul flops back on it.

 

* * *

 

 

"You're a fucking cyborg," Soul exclaims in dismay.

"Cyborgs can be hacked," Black Star loudly replies, rolling his eyes. He stands amidst his glowing monitors, and Maka is distantly amused that the god of the resistance is only half an inch taller than she is. Still, it's not amusing enough for her to ignore her headache. "All my babies are so encrypted, they make the Pentagon look open-source."

Soul scoffs. "Give me my phone, some cables, and five minutes," he boasts with a smile, making use of his intimidating fangs. He nods at the false leg currently attached to its owner. "Looks like it could use a gun."

Black Star narrows his eyes and noisily plops his foot on a chair, taking the energy drink out of his prosthesis. He swaps the cold can out with a new one.

 _"Energy legs,"_ his foot says.

"This is the home model. No guns. A couple knives, though. And a taser." He glugs his Monster down. "It's also gotta one-ten inverter, can jump-start a car, and makes the Zelda noise when I walk into the kitchen."

_**"Dude."** _

"Please tell me this meeting wasn't called so we could watch a dweeb courtship ritual," Jacqueline says at the Zombie-Risk table, boredly watching the proceedings with her life-sucking eyes.

"Don't press this button," Black Star says, ignoring the comment and introducing Soul to the rest of his modded arsenal.

"Grenade?"

"Girl Talk."

Maka finds herself agreeing with Jacqueline. She hasn't touched her lukewarm bowl of soup. "Why are we here," she groans at Sid, who sits next to her.

"Did you forget your meds again, Albarn?"

"No, _Major,"_ she snaps impatiently, and then realizes she's being rude to the one cured person she actually isn't weirded out around. She rubs her temples with her fingertips and attempts a less scathing tone. "Sorry. I'm just trying to wean myself off freakin' Vicodin."

Sid grunts. "The Doctor called the meeting. He requested you and your 'partner' be present."

This is when Marie walks in, face partially covered with an eye patch that shields the turned side Maka had burned into permanence with her blood. The others in the room greet her happily, like they haven't seen her in awhile. She walks over to Maka and places a hand on her shoulder.

"You mix a mean drink, Maka! I'm grateful, but I hope I never have another one again."

Maka attempts a mild grimace posing as a smile. "Me too." The others in the room exchange curious glances with each other -- all but Soul, who soberly stares at prostheses.

Breaking the silence, Black Star asks, "Where is Doctor Horrible, anyway?"

Marie rapidly blinks her gold eye. "He -- Well, he _was_ with me." She sighs. "Honestly, that man is so easily distracted--"

As if in response, what Maka is halfway sure is a throwing star launches out of a fake foot and into the ceiling, destroying a section of track-lighting. A cheerful victory fanfare plays out of the prosthesis in Soul's hands, which he casually hides behind his back.

Pieces of metal and ceiling tile fall around him. "My bad."

Sid's mouth-windows faintly whistle with stifled laughter. Black Star scowls. "What did I _just say_ about the button?"

"You said it was Girl Talk!" Soul defends.

"That was the other one! You effing user, how the shitting hell have you lived this long?!"

Dryly, Maka says, "I asked him the same thing."

No sooner than she says this, the building begins to loudly wail with ear-shattering sirens. She's on her feet with her knife in hand in an instant, panic shrieking through her bones.

"Okay, I did _not_ do that one," Soul shouts over the noise.

Black Star doesn't laugh. His hand flies for the collar of his shirt, pressing a button. "Tsubaki," he barks. There's no reply. _**"Tsu."**_

 

* * *

 

 

"We want to see the Prometheus!" the two women say in unison, blue eyes wild and desperate. The sisters -- because they are too similar in appearance to not be related -- are streaked in black and red blood, alike. Dirty hair ratted and mussed, each woman holds a gun in one hand and an arm of a sagging man between them in the other.

The taller of the sisters says, "Bring him to us!" while the shorter hisses, "I'm a quick trigger, mister, you wanna see who dies first?" to Harvey.

Tsubaki, calmly holding an over/under shotgun at her hip, stands steady as civilians evacuate out the front doors to the dam. "This place is meant as a safe haven," she says in an unwavering voice, lilac eyes level and light-bending. "You risk the lives of many by bringing in your infected past the checkpoint." The barrels of her gun unerringly point at the man between the sisters.

"We don't give a _shit_ about your survivors," the short one says.

The tall one points her revolver at Tsubaki. "I saw the feed. Give us Prometheus or I'll shoot your perfect teeth out your freak face."

"Do it and I'll rip your head off your neck," Black Star interrupts as he strides fearlessly, foolishly, into _point-blank range,_ armed with only video game noises and hidden tasers like the bluest idiotic monkey to have ever existed. Maka watches as the taller sister moves her gun from Tsubaki to him, warily eyeing first his hair, then his mere proximity, and then the bizarre contraption cooling a can of Monster in his leg.

The woman tightens her hold around the slumping man's arm. "Are you Prometheus," she growls, thumb pulling back the heavy hammer on her gun.

Black Star doesn't answer, and though Maka thinks Tsubaki is a hair's breadth from calling out his name in alarm, the cured holds her tongue. Black Star grasps the captive man by his hair, looking disdainfully upon his face while the rest of the dam stills in the shrieking of the alarms.

The man is hardly more than a boy, eyes already a blood red, his short black hair slowly turning white at his left temple. He drips with sweat, body convulsing at random intervals. He speaks short little syllables in a language Maka doesn't understand.

"What's he sayin'?" Black Star says loudly to be heard over the sirens.

"He won't speak English no more," the shorter one says. "We just wanna fuckin' save him, so would you hurry up or do I gotta shoot your other leg off?"

Next to Maka, Soul takes a mesmerized step forward. He's murmuring something, but she can only pay half-attention to the words because she's watching the armed sisters _notice_ him, his white hair the brightest of neon signs screaming 'bullet vacancy'.

The younger sister can't keep her eyes in one place, unwilling to stop watching Harvey and his drawn gun but unable to keep tabs on Soul. Panic and fury wash over the tall sister's face, her gun whipping up to align with Soul's head.  
Obliviously, he utters, _“The death god--”_ before Maka snaps forward, clutching him desperately by his shirt to jerk him back, forcing him to stumble behind her as she stands between him and the gun. Gran's knife, clutched in her sweaty hand, gives her the extra reach to press up against the tall woman's neck.

The gun jabs into Maka's chest, pressing into her pounding heart. She distantly hears herself howling _**“NO,”**_ over and over, but she’s so furious that she can't say anything she wants to say, like _He’s cured_ , or _Hurt him and I'll murder you all_ , or _I've seen what you've seen and I can't unsee it._

 _ **"Get out the way, bitch,"**_ the woman demands, digging the gun into Maka’s sternum. Everyone in the room is screaming to be heard, trying to thwart disaster, the sirens wailing in discordant alarm like pure adrenaline.

Through the din, Black Star roars, "SHUT THE **FUCK** UP!" and his imagined status as either a mistaken-Prometheus or self-proclaimed god halts the chaos. "Tsu," he orders, not taking his eyes off the infected boy. "Find where the shit the doctor went."

Maka can't see Tsubaki, her own eyes focused on the fluttering pulse under her knife, but the cured’s silence is loud enough.

 _"Tsubaki,"_ Black Star urges.

Then, a translation is raggedly spoken in Tsubaki's voice. _"'The death god has abandoned us all.'"_

Maka's eyes reluctantly move to the boy, who continues the same handful of syllables in delirious mantra, and she watches a second white streak burn across his left temple.

The shorter sister makes a pained wail in the back of her throat. "Sis, we gotta find Prometheus _right now--"_

"I am here," Doctor Stein says from a doorway, being towed along by one of the razor-teeth children -- Maka can't tell one from the other -- while the twin follows him with a shoebox of rattling vials and needles.

Upon seeing Castor and Claire, the woman still jabbing a gun at Maka's chest grits her teeth and frantically cries, "What kinda fuckin' place is this?!"

Maka almost responds with 'Mount Olympus,' but she doesn't think anyone would get it. Stein answers before her, anyhow. "This is Hoover Dam," he says matter-of-factly, looking at the tall sister as if she might be a little slow in the head. "I am Doctor Stein, the man they call Prometheus. Put your damn guns down, all of you." Castor/Claire pulls him forward towards the group. "This is at least four counts of contamination," he sneers. "Maka, what have I told you about attacking our peers?"

To her surprise, Harvey drawls behind her, "They started it, sir." She'd have to pay him back, somehow. Steal some pickles. Maybe give him Soul's sunglasses.

Slowly, everyone lowers their weapons -- all but Maka and the mystery woman in front of her.

"You first," the stranger says.

"Yeah, right," Maka replies, unwilling to give up the stalemate. She locks steely eyes with her, hand steady.

But then, as she hears familiar footsteps, the gun pressed between her breasts begins to tremble. The woman looks away, focusing on someone behind her.

Soul's tanned hand wraps around Maka's. Pressing warm at her back, he gingerly moves her arm away from the woman's throat. The sirens are too loud for anyone to hear what he says in her ear.

"Maka," he murmurs. "Thank you. It's alright."

No longer at knifepoint, the taller sister warily allows her gun-arm to fall to her side, icy stare wavering on Soul’s face before being pulled away by worry for the infected boy and Stein.

The doctor doesn't look pleased as he administers the injection. "This is an older version -- I don't have enough supplies for the newer formula," Stein tells no one in particular. "The reaction varies. Some take to it, others don't. If you had brought him through the damn checkpoint, we could have saved some time. Set him down."

The blood-shaking alarms abruptly silence, and Maka catches sight of Marie quietly stepping out of Sid's office with a pair of wire cutters.

"That's the antidote, right?" the short sister asks too loudly, one hand cushioning the back of the boy's head as he begins to convulse and spasm. "You didn't just fuckin' _euthanize him,_ right?!"

"We'll see," says Stein, evasively. "Hold open his eyes. Look, they're changing."

The infected boy's red eyes seem to fade, blood draining to leave behind a molten gold. The tall sister witnesses this and appears to realize something, head whipping to stare at freak-face Tsubaki who grimly stares back.

The boy begins chanting something new, and, when implored, Tsubaki replies, "He's saying it hurts."

"It's okay, kid, we're right here," one sister says while the other keeps him from thrashing so violently.

Stein sighs, shaking his head. Maka watches a third white streak appear, the boy’s dark hair burning to snowy ash, and she feels something in her skin being beckoned before the doctor even says, "There's not enough time. Maka. Plan B."

She doesn't realize her hand is still wrapped in Soul's until she walks towards the infected boy and is surprised to find herself anchored. Gently, she draws her hand away and holds his gaze while she places Gran’s knife in his hands.

He grimaces, understanding, when she hurriedly unwraps last night’s bandage from her finger. Soul advises over her head, "Hold him down."

She re-opens the scab on her finger as she runs her hand across the knife. Like with Soul and Marie, the infected boy's attention latches onto her like a magnet, a moth drawn to flame. He thrashes against the sisters, against Black Star and Stein, wide golden eyes glued to her or whatever it is that’s in her.

He chants new, fervid syllables.

"It's going to hurt a lot more," Marie says from somewhere. Maka distantly notes that the sisters are shooting questions, worried and confused and fearful, but she gives them little thought. She squeezes her hand and gathers the pooling blood, listening only for Tsubaki's translation as she directs the oozing droplets into the boy's gnashing, foaming mouth.

It soberly comes from Soul, instead.

_"'I see the fire.'"_

The boy screams louder than sirens.

 

* * *

 

 

"I watched anime back when I raided," he admits to her later, when she asks why he can understand Japanese.

"What he means to say is that he's a fucking otaku _and_ a Warcraft-addict," Black Star remarks while he unbuckles his prosthesis.

Tsubaki says something that causes the new boy to smile and, after half a breath of head-tilting, makes Soul snort to himself. Maka decides she doesn't care how he'd learned the language as long as she can watch Black Star's ego falter.

Liz and Patti Thompson (tall and short, respectively) walk into the ‘Motherbrain', which is evidently the official name of Black Star's computer disaster zone, look freshly showered and uncomfortable without their firearms. Kid, which isn't the boy's name but responds to it because only Tsubaki can pronounce his given one, is actually very fluent in English.

"My apologies for my sisters' behavior. They only did what they thought was necessary."

Black Star gives him a skeptical look while Tsubaki hands him a bowl of pseudo-chicken broth. "Sisters?"

The women in question each put a hand on the boy's shoulders and dare anyone to challenge the claim. Kid says, "They are my sisters, now. They robbed me in Manhattan--"

"That was _before,"_ Patti insists.

"That was before," he agrees. "And they protected me all the way here when the... ah..."

"When everything went to shit," Black Star supplies for him.

Liz drawls, "And now we're his."

"Whatever, dude. You can be his sisters, or mothers, or fucking matesprits, I don't give a shit. Just don't try to shoot my minions and we can continue to be excellent to each other."

Maka's head spins with the sheer mass of Old World references spewing out of Black Star’s mouth at any given moment. To her dismay, he turns his wheelchair to face _her_ , next.

"And **you,"** he says while she wraps a new band-aid on each of her freshly sliced fingers. She glowers at his exuberance. "Your blood just -- what the _fuck_ have you been _eating?"_

Sighing, Maka adjusts the adhesive of one bandage. She says, deadpan, "I took Mountain Dew as my mistress,” but only Soul gets the joke.

"You're such a troll," her partner mutters, amused while doing geek squad things to her phone she can’t begin to understand.

Maka flexes her stinging fingers. She still feels Black Star's insistent gaze demanding a better explanation, and she realizes that this might be the reason others continue to follow him; his persistence is other-worldly.

"I'm immune," she admits, the multi-colored eyes of #Resistance watching her in her tiny cage.

There is something in her, behind the bars of her skin. She isn't courageous, or craven, or even normal -- she is the fourth option, labelled 'I Don't Know'; the anonymous one, with wings of stolen fire.

Soul simply says, "You're a weapon."

 

 


	3. And their lips the secret kept

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Explicit sexual content in this chapter.

 

 

 

 

As tempting as it is to pop them like candy, Maka takes only half a Vicodin pill before crashing into Soul's air mattress. Soul takes off his shirt for sleep, which is a new thing, and a thing she can not stop thinking about. Climbing towers and dragging generators and swinging crowbars has done things for him. She pulls the quilt over her face.

"Wanna take yours off, too?" he teases.

She thinks she does want to, kind of. She's not sure why wearing a shirt or not wearing a shirt still holds any significance -- he's seen and touched her chest before, cutting off her blood-soaked shirt when she’d been injured -- but her face still heats up at the prospect.

"I can't tell if you're being serious or not," she replies instead, because that feels like the safest answer. Maka pulls the quilt down to her nose to see his reaction; she thinks his cheekbones tint a little.

"I can't tell either," he says, faintly smiling.

She sits up and pulls her shirt over her head. She's left in what she's pretty sure are jeans meant for teenaged boys, because Jacqueline hadn't been able to find any other pants that fit her. She keeps those on -- they hadn't found underwear in her size, either. She leans back, propped on her hands, letting her scar enjoy open air. She awaits judgement.

Soul says nothing. He kneels on the mattress, which teeters her higher off the ground like an air-filled see-saw. Slowly, he reaches out, placing a hand on her chest with an apology, which is not a favorable reaction when one has recently become half-naked with the intent of potential mutual touching/admiring/whatever it is two people who have made out _do_ -ing.

When he indicates a gun-barrel-shaped bruise on her sternum, leaning toward her left breast, it dawns on her.

"Don't do that again." His eyes are hidden under his hair, and his mouth settles into a line she recognizes because he made that face a lot when he was dying. "You've done it too many times already."

"I know what you're doing," she says, trying to sort out which emotion is predominant in her aching head right now. Her back hurts, her brain is throbbing, his warm fingers outlining her tit is making her heart race and nipples harden, and she kind of wants to choke him for being ridiculous.

He borrows old words. "You have to live."

"It's not the same."

Soul glares at her then, eyes carmine and searing through her like little deadly coals, pupils tiny pin holes because she won't sleep with the lights off if she doesn't have to. He pulls his hand away. "How is it not the same? You were gonna -- she woulda just _shot_ you!"

Maka closes her eyes, willing the pain in her body to fade for just a moment so she can focus on being angry. She slumps forward, putting her hands in her lap. "She would've shot _you._ In the damn brain," she spat. "Assuming you've got one! You were walking straight into it!"

He grimaces, looking away. "...The kid was saying weird shit. I haven't looked like this long. It's easy to forget people wanna kill me on sight." Maka watches him run a hand through his turned hair, another color she'd burned into permanence. "I can't--" he starts to say, but grits his teeth as he searches for words that don't exist yet. "The answer wasn't me. It's you. So stop _saving_ me."

"No," she says.

"Maka."

"No, I said!"

"You're too important! My life isn't _worth-_ -"

She howls, shoving him off the bed. He catches himself on the wall. _"You piece of shit!_ What I did and what you did back then are _not_ the same!"

She now understands that look he'd given her when she had played the 'you have a use so you need to stay alive' card, like he was worthless otherwise, like she wouldn't have cared if he lived or died if his blood hadn't had the potential of creating an antidote. She understands, and she wants to tear him apart for playing it on her; wants to tear herself apart for having given it to him in the first place.

Her eyes sting. "I didn't step in front of you because I thought my life was forfeit, or that I was 'expendable'." Her voice goes flat, as if emotionlessness could somehow cover up her longing. "I did it because I care if you die."

Soul peels himself off the wall, keeping his distance. He looks both like a tired old man and a lost little boy at the same time. "You shouldn't," he informs, insists, begs, questions. "We hardly know each other. What do you care?"

"Why'd you kiss me back," she returns. Before he can argue about answering a question with a question, she drowns him in more of them. "Why'd you make a deal? Why'd you tell me to wait? Why did you come here when everyone said you were avoiding being seen? Why are you attracted to me, Soul?" she asks.

Soul sighs, one hand idly scratching at the opposite shoulder. "I like you."

_"Why."_

His voice fills the room. "You didn't scream." He doesn't elaborate. If anything, his mind seems vacate his body, seeing things he does not tell her. It makes her uneasy.

"I almost did," she says quietly.

Eventually, he pops back into the room. "But you didn't. For some reason." He peers at her for a moment. "Are you gonna shove me off the bed again?"

She won't make promises she can't keep. "If you piss me off again."

"I'll risk it," he says, and settles in next to her. He lays on his back and quietly observes her body while she watches his ribs shift as he breathes. "When you found me," he says quietly, "you knew I could've turned at any second, but you took me with you." His eyebrows knit together. "I don't know if you actually believed in me, or just pretended, but I think it's because of that, I was able to--" She can almost see the words stick in his throat. "I didn't kill you, in the end."

No, he'd brought her to life instead, and she's still trying to decide if it's better or worse than her single-minded drive to survive had been.

"I like you 'cause you're a good person, Maka. Even if you don't think so."

She can't accept this. Stubborn, she tries to argue. "I'm a murderer," she tells him, voice thick.

Barely above a whisper, he replies, "So am I."

Maka meets his eyes for a long moment, unable to read his face. "...They don't count if they're already dead," she ventures.

"I'm not talking about zombies," he says, haunted. He takes in her silence and turns it on her, willing her to understand. "Still care if I die?"

She imagines him gone for the slightest second, and her heart sets on fire. She nods.

"Why."

Maka can’t begin know the circumstances of how he had killed someone who'd apparently still been breathing, but she thinks Soul Evans is too kind, too much of a gentle geek to hurt someone on purpose. So she says, "Because you're afraid of heights."

He’s stumped with that one, squinting in utter bafflement. _"What?"_

She smiles, maybe. Her lips curve into a thing that is otherwise difficult to make without another half of Vicodin. "You're afraid of heights, Soul. But you slept in cell towers to help people communicate with each other. You're afraid, but you tied yourself up in a tree because you don't wanna hurt anyone. You're _afraid,_ but I heard you walk. And then run," she says, voice cracking, letting her heart burn. "I heard you run across the roof and then _nothing_ , because you jumped."

He'd jumped and flown away for her when she could not.

Maka lays down on her good side, facing away from him so she can rub her eyes dry. "You're brave. And clumsy," she mumbles. "And you're kind of a prick. And I don't want you to die. If I have to keep this world, I want you to be in it."

The mattress shifts and Soul’s body curls around her, his fingers carefully touching the dark red line that writes her history on her back.

He says, "I don't care if you're some weapon to save us all. I just don't want you to get hurt, especially 'cause of me."

"Then stop doing _stupid_ stuff," she complains.

"I'm working on it, damn it."

"Tell that to the track lighting."

Soul groans in frustration into her spine, breath inspiring a tenuous kind of happiness she’s terrified to touch. "Just wait, one of these days I'll save you instead. See how you like them apples."

"Please don't, the apocalypse has already happened once," she says dryly.

But truthfully, he's already saved her too many times, too. He's bad at gambling, and if another person sacrifices their life to keep her safe, she'll be lost in the woods all over again.

And she knows, with a surety more deep than any well, that she would never stumble over another one like him to warm her heart awake.

 

* * *

 

 

She shouldn't be surprised that her blood is being discussed like a commodity, and she's not. She's more irritated than anything, because she has nothing insightful to add to the conversation to make them stop talking about her as if she isn’t there.

"Can we not dance around it and just get it out on the table?" Jacqueline says, holding a hand out to Sid's unfolded map and indicating the giant highlighted blob that is the infection of Death City. "She doesn't have enough blood. By the time Stein stockpiles enough from her, we'll be out of supplies, out of places to raid in range of the towers, and quite honestly I would kill you all being stuck here this long."

Doctor Stein flips through stained sheets of graph paper covered in his illegible notes. "I'm still trying to discern what it is in the blood that causes the reaction so I can re-create it, but I don't have what I need. The old lab--"

"We can't go to The Strip," Harvey says.

Black Star, pulling out a Serious Voice that seems to come out from nowhere, agrees. "There aren't enough bullets in the world for The Strip. When we got you out of there, three fourths of fucking Vegas came callin'."

"We lost Ford, we lost Diehl -- we almost Harvey and Marie, both," Sid adds.

"I know our losses," Stein says, pulling off his reading glasses. "I was there." He indicates the scars on his face before rubbing his bloodshot eyes. "I also need a test subject."

Marie asks the question of the day. "What _kind_ of test subject," she says apprehensively.

Gathering up his papers, Stein taps them into a semblance of alignment. "Preferably the kind I can't kill because it's already dead."

Tsubaki's voice is sweet and deadly. "You want to bring a walker. _Here._ "

"Unless you'd like to get infected again on the next raid for me, ShadowStag?"

Black Star jerks like he wants to stand in outrage, but remembers he only has one foot on today. _"Rot in psychotic mad scientist hell you fucking--"_

"Even if we could transport one here without infecting the entire dam," Sid interrupts, waving a corpselike hand at Black Star’s fury, "there's almost no way to single out a walker for capture without attracting another mob and getting overwhelmed. They're never alone."

"They can be, sometimes," Soul says, prying apart what used to be an alarm clock. At first, Maka thinks he’s referring to the Old Crone, or maybe even the zombie he'd gotten a lucky shot on from the library roof, but the longer she watches him meticulously rip open wires and circuitry, the more she suspects neither. He doesn't acknowledge the eyes of the Zombie-Risk think tank staring at him. "Figure out how to get it here, and I know where you can find one."

Stein's unnerving gray eyes, quicksilver but cold, latch onto Soul. Maka wants to pry them away from her partner; pry them apart like the alarm clock until she understand what he’s made of.

 **"Where,"** Prometheus demands.

Soul raises his head, eyes dead, hand emotionlessly gliding over the map to a spot where there are no seas of highlighter: west of Hoover Dam, south of Vegas, nestled between little canyons.

 

* * *

 

 

Stein does not clear her for the raid.

Soul gets his backpack of belongings and his crowbar returned to him two days after his arrival, and is cleared for the raid.

She stews in anger and withdrawal and pain. She has no one to take her irritation out on, because everyone not in the raid party is as on edge as she, and would probably bite back.

Black Star had not been cleared to leave either, because new survivors have made contact, and he is forced to direct them to a safe haven. He talks to Tsubaki through the microphone on his collar out of habit, becoming increasingly irritable every time he remembers she's not in range, having been cleared for the raid.

Jacqueline is more sour than usual, constantly in arguments with Stein because the doctor needs to draw more blood from Maka, but Maka battles iron deficiencies and anemia. The woman tells him the same thing every day. "We have beans. And we have beans. If you can magically produce some meat or fish or start farming spinach, by all means, I will shove it down her throat myself."

Maka eats various flavors of beans and washes them down with a sickeningly endless supply of Tang. "Vitamin C helps iron absorption," Stein had lectured her, and now her lips are always stained a different color.

The only person who does not seem on edge is Kid, who has somehow become the diplomat for the cured and is easily received by the civilians of Hoover Dam, even if his companions had recently threatened to shoot them all. It's his calm, easy relationship with the still very human Thompson sisters that bridges the gap between normal and _other._ While the others are out on the raid, Kid frequently tries to help Maka integrate with the people-- usually young women and children because she probably looks like both-- and introduces her as a survivor, which she isn't allowed to deny.

"If it weren't for Maka, I would have been lost," he tells a young girl with dark hair as the three of them stand on a bridge overlooking the dam. Kid is then conveniently called away by the sisters to eat lunch. Maka grimaces at the thought of another packet of Tang and lifelessly waves goodbye to him, feeling awkward now that she’s alone with the girl.

"I saw it happen through the windows," she says, looking to Maka with a shy tint to her cheeks. "You can really cure everyone?"

Maka searches for words, stammering. "I-- My blood destroys the virus, but... I don't think it heals anybody," she says carefully.

Tsugumi seems to take this into consideration. "What does your blood do to walkers?" the girl asks.

"I haven't seen it, but I'm told they die. Permanently."

The girl looks kind of sad, but nods, her thin black pigtails bouncing around. "Good," she says quietly.

Eyebrows furrowed, Maka blurts, _"Good?"_

Tsugumi holds her chin up a little higher, looking out at the Colorado river, and her voice takes on that specific cadence that Maka has learned people use when they fondly talk about the dead. "My brother said when people die, they need to rest. But all the walkers can't." She nods again. "So, it's good! You can cure death, so everyone can go to the deep sleep."

In the back of her mind, Maka has known killing the undead is something that needs to be done-- out of necessity, out of a need to live to the next day-- but never had she considered destroying them 'good'. She doesn't know what to say, and only stares at the girl who can somehow give her an encouraging smile. Finally Maka gathers her wits and offers, "I'll do my best."

"...If you have time," Tsugumi asks, as if Maka is a busy person with a lot of work on the schedule, "will you help my brother sleep, too?"

 

_The Reaper is late._

 

She swallows the things in her that desperately want out. "We'll give them all the deep sleep," she says.

Tsugumi smiles. “We’ll all help.” Then she tilts her head a little, looking at Maka critically. “When your hair gets longer, can I fix it like mine? I think you’d be cute.”

Caught off-guard, Maka pictures herself with pigtails and imagines Soul mocking her. She scoffs. "Sure."

As Jacqueline hunts her down with a tray of beans and powdered drinks, she realizes she’s just promised a teenaged girl that she’ll kill millions.

She won't make promises she can't keep. It seems she does have a lot of work to do, after all.

 

* * *

 

 

Harvey's voice appears outside her door on the evening of day four, as Maka is staring blankly at her phone between non-informative feed refreshes.

"They're back," he says.

Her phone bounces on the bed when she heedlessly tosses it aside. She wrenches the door open, and it bounces off the bed a little, too. Harvey's face is as blank as always; his sunglasses reveal nothing.

"Are they hurt? Is Soul okay?"

"No one was hurt," he says, hesitant, which is such a strange occurrence that it raises red flags on its own. Harvey does not move from the doorway, giving her no room to pass through.

Maka's gut goes leaden with dread, realizing he's not here to summon her elsewhere, but to tell her something in confidence.

"What happened."

"Everything went to plan, so I've heard. Raid was a success." She hates that he's heard anything before she has, but holds her tongue. "Albarn, the walker they brought back..."

 _"Spit it out,_ " she blurts anxiously.

"The place Evans took them was his **house."**

 

* * *

 

 

A walker that looks like a taller version of Soul struggles at the heavy chains wrapped around its body. From inside the cage in Stein's lab, its red eyes focus on anything that moves, flickering on Soul as he speaks.

"I trapped him there 'cause... I panicked. And I thought, maybe, I could find a way to save him." He stares numbly at who used to be his brother, unflinching as the walker gnashes its fangs behind a metal mask.

 

_I can't sit here and let it happen._

 

Stein gently -- or at least not harshly -- says, "Soul, there's--"

 _"I know._ I've known," he replies. "The only cure for death is death." Soul stalks out of the laboratory.

There’s a bite mark on Soul’s brother’s neck, but also a blackened stab wound in the stomach, bloodstains having bloomed on the walker’s shirt in rusty petals. When it occurs to Maka which wound had killed the man, she thinks she knows why Soul's eyes always warily watch her knife.

She finds him where he thinks no one would look, sitting with his back to a barrier of the tallest bridge. She joins him, letting their shoulders touch. His outstretched legs are twitchy, his sneakers steadily knocking together to a beat she doesn't know.

"Wes was like you, just stood in front of her," he says. "Mom had already turned though. He didn't get it-- she was _gone._ " Maka takes his hand in hers. He whispers to the wind, "I didn't mean to."

She can picture it easily enough: his brother accidentally stabbed, his mother biting the son that had tried to protect her. "Soul, I can... cure him, if you want."

"I know, but don't."

"Stein might _do_ things that--"

"He needs a test subject."

 

_Will you help my brother sleep, too?_

 

Maka aches.

"We can find another one."

His fingers clench hers tightly, his voice hard to hear in the wind playing on the bridge. "It's okay. My brother's already dead. That walker is just a ghost wearing his body."

Soul's legs and knocking feet abruptly stop. He goes very still, and for a moment he looks like a zombie in stasis, but his sclera give him away, white and glistening with tears. "Besides, if it meant he could help fix everything, he would've wanted this." He forces it out between clenched wolf teeth. _**"I really admired him."**_

 

* * *

 

 

Despite how exhausted he looks from the raid and its spoils, Soul doesn't sleep much that night. In the morning, Maka tells him to get some rest and he's so bleary-eyed that he doesn't bother resisting.

She puts on a shirt and pads her way to the Motherbrain. She feels unusually centered, feeling rested and thrumming with energy. She has an urge to do something constructive. Maybe Sid can find her something to work on, today-- something to help her find a way to keep her promises.

Her mood is gone faster than it had appeared the moment she walks into the room for the morning's meeting. Sid isn't there, but Marie, Tsubaki, and Stein all look in her direction when she walks into the room, the three of them regarding her for a moment before huddling back into hushed conversation.

She doesn't like it.

"You're sure," Stein says.

Tsubaki nods.

"This _sets us back,"_ he drawls unhappily.

Marie chides him. "You knew it was going to happen eventually."

The doctor nods and agrees dismissively, gathering up his papers. He says to Tsubaki, "Take care of it. I'll be in the lab."

Stein strides out of the room, and Tsubaki’s not far behind, her hand reaching for her collar. "Sid," she calls, the man's reply garbled as she walks out of earshot.

"...What's going on?" Maka asks Marie, who sits down at her usual spot at the Risk table.

The older woman carefully moves aside one of Black Star's prosthetics. "It'll be another busy day, sounds like," she replies, evasive. "Time to plan the next raid."

The meeting is another one of those talk-about-Maka-as-if-she-isn't-there kinds, Marie and Black Star and Jacqueline (and a silent Harvey) discussing how Maka needs protection, needs to stay well fed, needs her magical blood to be studied and synthesized and stockpiled, and does anyone know jack shit about biochemical warfare?

Her only reprieve from the meeting is when Sid finally appears and tells her it's her turn for the showers. "Schedule change," he explains, when she gives him a confused look.

"But the meeting--" Maka balks, thumbing at the table. "The next raid."

"You won't be going on the next raid," Black Star says, painting his monogram on one of his prosthetics that already has hundreds of existing iterations on it. He looks haggard and almost as tired as Soul had been this morning -- the raid to Soul's house hadn't brought him any energy drinks.

Maka has no pity for him, mostly because she's never sure if she hates him or not, but also because she's recently been through withdrawal and is kind of gratified to see its effects on his stupid face. _"Why not,_ " she asks, voice full of malice. She knows she's valuable, but she has promises to keep.

The caffeine-crashed monkey merely raises an eyebrow, nonplussed. "Because you're a girl," he says, tone airy and mocking. He's lucky Sid is standing right next to her, because the man holds Maka back before she can get another chance at Black Star's nose.

"If you have a complaint, take it up with the doctor. It's his orders," Sid says, shoving her new schedule scrawled on a post-it into her hand.

She hisses, crumpling the paper and wishing it were Hoover Dam’s collective skull. "I will."

Sid kicks her out of the room and tells her to either hit the showers or jump into the river.

 

* * *

 

 

Because the first twenty minutes of the meeting had resulted in Maka no longer being allowed to go anywhere without an escort (for her safety-- or rather her _blood's_ safety),Tsubaki accompanies her to the showers. After seeing her in conspiracy mode with Stein and Marie on top of a sudden and suspicious schedule change, Maka is not pleased with her babysitter.

The showers are a set of now-unisex bathrooms with half the stalls converted by a hodgepodge of PVC, adapter hoses, and hand-held shower heads. #Resistance sets a strict showering rotation to help conserve water and soap, and keeps the area from overflowing with breathers.

Tsubaki takes advantage of the situation, undressing and taking her own shower in the next stall over. If she has any reservations about being nude in front of someone else, her eyes don't show it. Maka kind of thinks it a peace-offering, a show of 'you could stab me dead if you wanted'. She hates that it kind of works.

There's new and shiny pink scar tissue running up Tsubaki's body and curving around her neck and shoulders. She looks like she'd been shredded alive. Even though her skin is terribly marred, she's hips and boobs in a way that most women are not. Her breasts sway like pendulums, and Maka can't comprehend the physics.

"My hair used to be very long," the woman says after squirting too much shampoo in her hands. "When I got the injection, it started growing back this color, so I cut all the white off." She shamelessly walks around the stall and gives Maka the excess soap, though it's too much for her hair, too.

"Mine only passed my shoulders, a little," Maka murmurs, feeling strange talking to someone while showering. She hasn't done this since she was on track and field in high school. "Soul cut it for me when I got hurt."

Tsubaki's voice floats over the stall wall. "It's a very nice color. I'm kind of jealous, though I'd look silly with it."

Maka’s never considered having anything worth being envious over, so she doesn't know what to say. "Thank you," she ventures, though it's not like she'd had any choice in hair color.

As she’s watching lather run off her bangs and into the drain, she finds red dripping down her leg. After a long, mind-altering moment, she realizes it's her period. "Tsubaki..."

But she doesn't have to explain, because Tsubaki is already handing her a plastic bag of miscellaneous _stuff,_ explaining to her stiffly, clinically, that she can smell things through eighty feet of concrete. Maka digests this, experiencing an apathetic sort of clarity, now having found out the full meaning of 'most of the lingering effects are purely cosmetic'.

She feels partly like she's twelve and in sex-ed class again, and partly like she's an animal that’s been taken in as a pet by an eccentric predator. "I haven't had one in months," she says, numbly watching Tsubaki demonstrate folding a silicone _thing_ in ways that don't look promising. She tries to remember when her last period had been, and realizes it was during the prehistoric age of Five-ish Months Ago.

"You're getting better," the cured informs her. Granted, Maka hasn't been eating marmalade and canned tuna every other day anymore (just beans and _beans_ and Tang and _**beans**_ ), but she hadn't given it any thought. "Sorry for not telling you about this directly," she says as Maka holes up in a toilet stall and suffers from acute embarrassment. Tsubaki sounds a lot more human when she can’t be seen. "Most people don't react well when I come up to them and say 'I can smell blood from anywhere in a three mile radius'. I'm scary enough as it is."

The whole situation is borderline surreal -- the world has ended and she’s rather pointlessly menstruating. Her fingers fumble with the little silicone bowl in her hands. Maka can't decide if she's irritated, mortified, or grateful.

She mumbles, “You're not _that_ scary." Creepy, however... "Everyone is just jealous of your teeth."

Tsubaki lets a laugh slip on the other side of the stall. "I have a permanent retainer," she admits.

If someone whose beauty had been torn to shreds can laugh in the zombie apocalypse, Maka supposes she can figure out a fucking mooncup.

 

* * *

 

 

Soul isn't in their room when Tsubaki escorts her back.

"I'm not supposed to leave you by yourself," she says, fluctuating uneasily between friendly ex-brace-face and security guard ShadowStag. They leave to find out if the morning's meeting is still going and if anyone knows where Pianoman is.

The meeting is over, and the command center holds Black Star, who snores in his wheelchair, and Soul, who had evidently wandered in and had begun to study the many monitors in the room. His red eyes analyze the screen with the weird version of Google Maps with little cell towers and scattered phone signals blinking in unison.

He looks a little better than he had this morning. Sort of. "What's goin' on?" he says quietly after shuffling over to them in the doorway. Despite having gone on a raid with her, Maka notes he still has a tendency to look guarded around Tsubaki.

The woman's teeth flash with a pleasant smile, either ignoring his unease or maybe silently acknowledging it. "Have either of you eaten, yet? Let's have lunch."

Soul balks outright at this. "Uhh-- I don't wanna cause a panic attack walkin' down there--"

Maka frowns and grabs him by the shirt sleeve before he can back away. "Kid got them used to Sid," she tells him, which isn't a total lie -- the civs have stopped panicking when they see Stein's 'monster' in direct sunlight, at least. "They can get used to you." And if they don't, she'll put her knife to their throats, too.

"I'll meet you two down there, then," Tsubaki says, giving Maka a pointed look before walking ahead without them.

To Soul's questioning glance, Maka dryly replies, "I'm supposed to have an escort everywhere now." She releases his shirt, gauging his reaction.

After peering at Tsubaki's retreating form and taking in the solitude the woman had left them in, he smirks, a switch flipped. "An _escort_ , huh?"

"Not that kind of escort," she mutters, blushing furiously and walking without him. "You seem to be doing better."

"I'm fine, don't change the subject. What kinda escort are you talking about, then?"

"The-- they're just the _babysitter_ kind, that's all."

Before she even finishes speaking, she knows he's got that shit-eating-piranha grin on his face. "You're into babysitters too? Dang, Maka."

She refuses to groan in frustration. She doesn't want to give him the satisfaction.

"I can be your escort. I'm younger than you though, so you'll have to be my babysitter."

Maka stops in the middle of the hallway and gives him an incredulous look over her shoulder. **"What?"** She’s conflicted, unsure if she should be allowing him to catch up and slide his hand in hers instead of maybe taking her fist and applying it to his gut.

He leans in a little. _"I promise I'll go to bed when you tell me to,"_ he says in a low voice that makes her face boil.

She shoves him into the wall out of pure embarrassment and leaves him. "You're grounded," she mumbles, continuing towards the direction of lunch.

Soul closes the distance, taking her hand again. "Hey waitaminute. Stop, seriously though," he says, pulling her to a halt in the hallway. "If we're making out or something--"

"Souuul," she wheezes. "Tsubaki's waiting on us--"

"No, listen! Is your bodyguard or whatever gonna have to like, watch you? Make out with me? And… _stuff?_ " He looks disgruntled at the prospect.

She hadn't considered this, but instead of worrying about it, she seizes the opportunity. "What, you're into bondage but not exhibitionism?"

"I..." Soul squints, calculating her. "No. No, I'm not," he says definitively, pulling her to him and kissing her.

She'd kind of anticipated this as one of the potential outcomes of this ridiculous conversation, but Maka is still unprepared when his arm snakes around her waist and holds her to his body. Her fingers clutch the leather of his jacket.

He kisses the corner of her mouth, saying, "No matter how serious you try to be, your blush gives you away." His grip is demanding but his mouth is bogglingly gentle. He does things to her lips with his teeth and tongue that cause sparks to bloom in her bloodstream.

His mouth trails down her neck and she says, "Is that... why you always say perverted things?" Does he know this is the first time she has kissed him without narcotics? She thinks he does.

"You caught me," he flatlines, pulling back and regarding her. "I have a kink for blushing post-apocalyptic girls."

Maka blinks. "Was that _me?_ Were you just imitating me?"

"Yeah, how was it?"

She chokes on an involuntary laugh. "It was awful."

 **"You're both awful,"** says an irritated Black Star from down the hallway. Maka and Soul cringe in each other's arms. "Game shark. Shark week," he addresses them, his prosthetic foot angrily thumping on the floor as he stomps over. "This ain't the hotel motel Holiday Inn."

Maka feels sixteen again, ready to throw either herself or Black Star off Hoover Dam. Does everyone know she's on her period?!

"What's up," Soul says in extremely feigned cordiality.

"Me," Black Star spits. He gives them both a withering glower. "I had to wake the fuck up and put on my _foot_ , so I could locate the truant-ass nooblettes, only to find out you're fifteen yards down the goddamn hall making pathetic rom-com eyes at each other. You are awful." The aggravated man throws his hand to his shirt collar and barks, **"Tsu."**

 _"Yes,"_ comes the staticy reply.

"I found your fucking lemmings. They'll be wherever the hell they are supposed to be--" he says, carefully enunciating each word as a tide of caffeine deprivation amplifies his displeasure, " _\--immediately."_

With threat of being found again (with the taser) if Maka doesn't show up for lunch in less than three minutes, Black Star sends them off without escort so he can wash out his eyes with bleach. Walking hand in hand again, Maka thinks her face will melt off if it gets any warmer.

"It was worth it," Soul muses. "You weren't even high that time."

He'd gotten her to smile.

 

* * *

 

 

During lunch, she finds out just how fine Soul isn't. He's still tired and can't muster the effort to put on his usual armor of perverted quips and geeky smiles when contending with the breather mob.

It's worse when Liz Thompson sees the both of them together. The woman's unease as she sits next to Kid and Patti is palpable enough that the surrounding folding tables filled with people have all lapsed into tense silence. She glances at Maka, her blue eyes darting to her hands to check for knives, before flitting over to Soul, where they stick. Where everyone's eyes stick.

Soul mechanically eats his instant mashed potatoes, doing that mind-vacation from the body thing. He acknowledges no one. Nothing is said for a long while.

Maka's teeth grind with frustration. She imagines all sorts of conversations to start with Liz, except none of them have friendly endings. Thanks for not shooting Soul in the head. How many brains has she made bullet holes with? Is her affection for Kid a result of some kind of reverse Stockholm Syndrome?

She drinks her Tang and lusts after Tsubaki's Spaghetti O's.

Eventually, Kid breaks the silence, though he doesn't sound or look like he's doing it out of awkward sympathy, which is probably why he's good at playing the diplomat. "Soul, I have a question for you."

Soul tenses next to her, forced back into reality and preparing himself for a round of uncomfortable inquiry.

"I hear that you and Black Star are both... intellectuals? Of a sort."

At a loss, Soul scratches the side of his head. "Is that really the word you're lookin' for?"

Next to Kid, Patti smiles, evidently not at all bothered by Soul now that she knows he's not going to attack anyone or her 'brother'. She munches on a pickle that makes Maka pang with jealous hunger. _"Hackers,"_ she clarifies.

"Oh." Soul shrugs. "Then yeah, I guess. ...Why?"

"I want to get a message to my father. He's a very powerful -- well, I'm hoping he's still a powerful man," Kid says, deviating a moment into silence. "Anyway, is it possible to gain control of a satellite?"

Soul's mouth hangs slightly ajar, zombie-fangs showing. "Hack a satellite?" He mulls this over, looking a bit more awake. "I don't see why not. The military ones might be … _interesting_ , but the older ones hardly have anything in them to hack, they're so simple. A signal should be easy," he says. "Ah, if someone were listening for one."

Kid nods. "There's also the possibility of making use of imaging satellites."

The two dive deep into the topic, and Maka's waning attention is suddenly caught by a pair of gleaming sunglasses. On the other side of the room, Harvey stands near the wall of windows, next to the door that leads out to Stein's lab.

Unsure if he's staring at her or just the general area, Maka subtly raises her chin. In response, the cured man tilts his head at the door, calling her over.

Maka stands from the table, eager to leave her beans. "I'll be right back."

"Where are you going?" Tsubaki asks, the table's hacker talk paused with the interruption.

"Just gonna talk to Harvey a minute." Unenthusiastically, she adds, "I'll be under _parental supervision."_

At the door, Harvey does not look pleased to see her. He doesn't look anything. "The doctor will see you now," he says.

She frowns, confused. "More bloodwork?"

Harvey lets himself out the door, showing no interest if she follows or not. Striding away, he says, "You're the one who wanted to lodge a complaint. Or didn't you?"

Maka trots after him, taking the path to Stein's laboratory and silently wondering if Harvey asked for an audience with the doctor for her, or if something else is going on.

The wind blows the growing, lopsided layers of her hair into her eyes as they cross a bridge. She kind of wants it cut again, but it would be better to grow it out and pull it all back. Plus, she made a promise to Tsugumi, and so far that seems to be the only one she can work on while mysteriously banned from raids. "Do you ever go on the raids?" she asks.

"Rarely."

"So, you're pretty much Stein's security guard."

"Why are we having this conversation?"

Maka folds her arms over her chest and sighs, walking alongside him. "I figure if I'm going to be escorted everywhere I may as well get to know my babysitters." She tries not to blush, thinking about Soul and his talk about _escorts_ , though she doesn't think Harvey would react even if she turned rainbow in the face. "We don't have to have it."

They walk a few paces, and she assumes the topic dropped, but Harvey surprisingly answers. "They like having a sharpshooter guarding him."

Her eyebrows pinch together with the vagueness of that answer. "Do _you_ like having a sharpshooter guarding him?"

They continue several feet before he answers, again. "I owe him my life, so I will guard his." Which is probably is a fair statement -- many of them owe their lives to Stein, including herself, even if he is a creepy man who gets too excited at the prospect of twice-dead bodies. "Would you be able to sleep at night with that guy being unguarded?" Harvey counters.

Now she thinks she understands Soul's amazement whenever she attempts a joke. "Some people would consider what you just said humorous."

"My apologies."

She's just met her sarcasm rival. She's not sure how she feels about this unexpected challenge from a man who wears sunglasses at night. The curiosity eats her alive. "What color are your eyes?" she asks, but they have arrived at the lab and Harvey merely opens the door to let her inside.

"Nice try," he says, and shuts the door after her, resuming his guard post outside.

The lab is relatively quiet save for the sound of flickering burners and bubbling liquids. It stinks of infection and old blood, but it's a familiar smell and Maka slips into it easily, almost comfortably.

The man who was once Wes Evans slowly rouses from stasis, standing in his cell. Gran-Crone flashes through Maka’s memories, and her heart makes a painful reply. "Stein?" she quietly calls.

"Here." The doctor sits on his cot in a far corner, wedged between notebooks and loose graph paper. He has a bottle of water in one hand and an open book in the other. "I won't be drawing blood from you until you're done bleeding," he informs her, setting the bottle on a lab table and turning a page in the book. "You're here because?"

She dully acknowledges how valueless she is to this mad scientist when she can’t provide him with more experimentation. Maka glances at the gold letters inlaid on the cover of the book and catches a glittery 'Emerson'. She hadn't figured the doctor a man of poetry.

Stein's eyes humorlessly regard her. "I don't get to choose my reading material," he explains. "What do you want."

"I want to go on the next raid."

"And I want to dissect an extraterrestrial. We don't always get what we want."

She distracted from arguing back, the caged walker dragging its heavy chains across the floor of the cell. Her spine turns to ice -- even with the height difference and a mask that looks like it had come straight off Hannibal Lecter's face, the walker looks so very much like Soul. Maka shudders, reeling with nausea as she imagines the turned desperately hissing _'don't scream'._

"I've saturated this room in the scent of death. It disguises me. When Harvey and Marie walk in here, it disguises them. But not you. _Can you guess why, Miss Albarn?"_

She can’t look away. Red eyes snap to her, little carmine moths reaching for flame. Her pulse quickens, mouth going dry. Maka's hand shakily feels for the handle of her knife.

"If you think going on a raid while _menstruating_ is an acceptable course of action, you probably shouldn't be allowed on **any.** I suppose we should be grateful your cycle halted from stress and slowly starving to death, else you never would have made it here alive." He raises his voice to be heard over the clamor the walker creates in its ravenous desperation to get to Maka. "By all rights, we should lock you up so you don't escape, either, but I'm told you're not our prisoner."

The ghost of Wes Evans howls and spits, hunting cat eyes trained on her, _drinking her up_ as she trembles, panicked at the sight of _Soul_ dashing himself against the bars, of _Soul_ straining to kill her and free himself from limbo.

"The best we can do is try to keep you from being an imbecile," Stein sneers. "You are not allowed on the next raid. **Get out."**

"Brother," Wes cries to her, the one word he’d left behind when he died, burned into neural pathways and ghost memory. _"Brother,"_ he screams, and Maka is being wrestled away from the room, restrained, dragged, _attacked_.

She lashes out with her one measly talon, desperate to escape-- a caught bird is a dead bird, and she can't die yet.

"Albarn! Get your -- _**watch it**_ **-** \- get your shit together," Harvey orders her, hand clamping over her wrist and squeezing until she recognizes who the hell he is and how much he's hurting her. She forces herself to drop the knife, the metal singing on concrete.

Her bones rattle like a storm, her breath coming out in whistling gasps. She backs away from Harvey, holding herself as far away as she can while still being restrained by her aching wrist and a handful of her shirt.

"What happened," he demands, slowly letting her go as if he doesn't trust her to not suddenly dive for her knife and try to slice open his throat again, which is probably a valid precaution.

 _You're getting better_ , Tsubaki had said, not 'you are better'.

She takes in a burning lungful of air and tries to form the words that explain she's on her period, or that she's an imbecile, or her PTSD is showing and she should be kept locked up, but the words don’t come. She wobbles to the bridge railing and tries to be a breather.

"They don't look anything alike," Harvey says, striking the heart of the problem in an instant.

Maka takes in a few breaths that are less like hyperventilation. Is she that easy to read? "Are you blind?" she replies weakly.

"Colorblind. Difference."

The rushing war-drumming of her heart is finally slowing down. She looks at him over her shoulder, skeptical. He's still catching his breath too, after having dealt with her. "Even so... the hair, their teeth. They're _brothers_ , they look al--"

"No they don't," he insists, voice firm.

This is when Soul worriedly calls for her from the other end of the bridge. "Maka!" he shouts, but for the life of her, she can't turn her head to look at him, too afraid to compare him to his dead brother in the cage, lunging for her.

Harvey bends to pick up her knife, presenting it to her handle-first. "I thought you might be colorblind too, for awhile."

"Why?" Maka gingerly takes the blade from Harvey, noting a nick in the metal she'll have to smooth out, later. Soul calls her name again, anxious and worried; she doesn’t answer.

"The day the sisters came. With the resistant boy," Harvey says, straightening his clothing that rumpled during their struggle. "Everyone was watching the kid and his eyes, waiting for him to turn. But I had my gun pointed at the little sister. And you..."

"I had this on Liz," she slowly supplies, sheathing Gran's knife back at her hip.

He nods, maybe -- it's such a slight movement she can't be sure. "You weren't looking at the color of her eyes. You were looking behind it." He slowly backs away, almost casually resuming his usual post outside the laboratory door. "When you turn around, what will you see?" he asks.

In the lab, she'd seen a glimpse of what might have been had she not been given a gift. Outside, she turns around and sees a half-boy, half-man, all earnest eyes and carved frown, who tries to ignore the staggering height of the bridge as he makes his way across his fear to her, and she sees _the soul._

Maka breathes. "You owe Stein your life," she tells Harvey before Soul makes the last few feet to her. "I owe all the dead mine."

Because the thing inside her designed to destroy the dead had also saved the man who reminds her that her heart still exists.

 

* * *

 

 

Four days after being brought to Hoover Dam, Wes Evans's body is buried on the Nevada side of the Colorado River, atop a tall cliff that overlooks the water. Soul tells her his brother hadn't been afraid of heights and would've thought the view was cool.

Doctor Stein had killed him, learning that a dilution of Maka's blood an effective contact poison for the undead. With this discovery, the blood bank of Maka Albarn could be stretched to many thousands of gallons of weaponized zombie-insecticide.

She still has to eat her beans and Tang.

Mount Olympus prepares for war. A new window is displayed on one of Black Star's monitors, giving readouts of connected satellites and awaiting any kind of response from the outside. Kid taps out messages on a keyboard that has hiragana instead of letters on the keys, sending signals to the silence of space.

Soul and Black Star design tiny little canisters and machines while they discuss the nature of chemical warfare. "We should make pills, too. For us. She can't be everywhere at once, and the moment her blood's exposed, you may as well hit that stupid button on your foot."

"Yeah, okay. Pills for fuckups, fine. I like _bombs."_

"Bombs are teamkillers. Just make foggers and fumigate them all."

"We should get gas masks. How did we get this far into the apocalypse without gas masks?"

Maka sits on the floor of the command center, going through various stretching poses to regain some range of motion in her scarred back. If they can prepare for war (or in Black Star's case, preparing for a nerdmonkey fashion show), so can she. "Bullets," she says, grimacing through the taut pull of scar tissue. "Right now, they only work on brains."

 **"Bullets,"** the geek squad agrees in unison. Black Star talks into his collar, "Hey Harvey."

 _"What now."_ Maka can almost picture the irritated sunglasses.

"Round up the gunslingers, we got science to do."

There’s an electronic sigh. _"They found the caffeine pills, didn't they."_

"Fuck yes they did. Now mosey."

"Hey... guys?" Kid says from the monitor array, holding his hands away from the keyboard like he's worried he's done something wrong.

"Your dad send somethin' back?" Black Star asks, wheeling around to him.

Maka sits up from her stretch and watches the boy shake his head. "No. But I think one of your cell towers just went offline."

She thinks she hears a snake hissing in the room, like a leaky hose or a simmering tea kettle, but she realizes it's Soul saying the longest-ever documented, _"Shhh_ _ **it**_ ," in the relatively new history of mankind.

 

* * *

 

 

"I didn't ask because I didn't want to jinx whatever voodoo you've been usin', but how exactly have those generators been runnin' this long?" Sid asks. "We haven't had to send crews for upkeep since you got here."

The Motherbrain parliament has reconvened for the present crisis of failing cell towers. Two more have disappeared from the network during the gathering. Soul has taken up staring blankly into the abyss like some oracle, seeking answers from the great beyond. His feet bounce his legs under the Risk table.

"I took a generator and hooked it to an auto-transfer switch hooked to a bank of duct taped deep-cycle batteries hooked to the biggest UPS I could lift from Fry's," Soul exhales in one long breath.

The room collectively squints at Soul in silence while Black Star deposits his face into the palm of his hand and snorts out a weird combination of laughter and choking. "How the _fuck,"_ he gasps.

Stein evidently has no fear of sounding ignorant, and it's most likely because he's outrageously intelligent in other subjects. "What."

Soul abruptly gives up the abyss and shrugs, running a hand through his unruly hair. “Mountain Dew,” he snaps back, though only Maka gets it. "Plus or minus some _stuff --_ who cares? _"_

"The more important question," Jacqueline says, tossing her phone on the table with a clatter, "is 'can you fix it'."

Soul makes frustrated noises until he finds his words. "The batteries might have cooked. Maybe they _exploded._ Maybe the carb's fucked 'cause any gas we siphon is at least six months old and it's clogged up everything. They're temp fixes. Even if they're salvageable, they won't work for much longer."

"We're not gonna be able to track the teams anymore," Sid says.

"The towers with solar panels will still work," Tsubaki reminds them. "We'll just have to do it like before. Update through the feeds."

Black Star tilts back in his wheelchair, balancing on the wheels. "We're sitting on seventeen gigantoid turbines. When there's less things out there wanting to eat our faces, we can start rebuilding. Right now though, we got shit to do." He sets back down in his chair properly and enlarges the map window on his computer.

His finger jabs into a spot on the map, uncaring that his thumb makes little rainbows in the liquid crystal. "We've got civs waiting on us."

One glance at the map and Tsubaki goes eerily pale, the scars that crawl up her chest and neck standing out in stark contrast. She stands, gliding over to the monitor and slowly moving Black Star's hand away from it. She stares at the screen and says nothing.

"That looks an awful lot like The Strip," Marie says.

Tsubaki's light-bending eyes bore ruthlessly into Black Star, who bears it with determination. "I would've sent them anywhere else if I could," he says to her silence.

"The _Chapel?"_ she accuses.

"They were boxed in. That was the only place."

With horrified fascination, Maka watches Tsubaki's face become _ugly_ , contorting with unearthly fury. "'There aren't enough bullets in the world for The Strip'," she quotes.

"You're right. There aren't."

Harvey speaks, voice cold and distant. "How do we get to them without killing half of ourselves in the process?"

Black Star points at Maka. "Her. Her and blood weapons."

Soul says skeptically, "Blood weapons that... we’re yet to make."

Lethal gibbon smile in place, Black Star replies, "Before we lose the rest of those towers, I want us to pillage the fuck out of a Lowes. We're gonna get our Rosie Riveter on and build us some **bombs."**

 

* * *

 

 

Maka dips the pointy end of a bullet in a cocktail of blood, water, and some long word with prefixes and suffixes that keeps it all from turning into pink cottage cheese. Her arm is hooked to another IV, trailing to a blood bag somewhere.

"You shouldn't be able to give this much blood," Stein says, taking the coated projectile with tweezers and setting it on a tray to cure. "Whole blood should only be taken every eight weeks."

She hates the feeling of _things_ sitting under her skin, tired of it really, and doesn't like that her blood is being milked like venom from a snake. "That hasn't stopped you, apparently," she replies, idly coating another bullet; getting her Rosie Riveter on. "Weren't you the one complaining that I wasn't giving enough in the first place?"

"We're on a tight schedule. The point is, it hasn't stopped _you,"_ he corrects.

"...Maybe it's the Tang."

Stein’s face is made up of two parts stitch-scars and eight parts under-eye sag. Maka realizes she's never seen the man sleep. "You're an anomaly, Miss Albarn," he says, staring at her like she's the oracle’s abyss that will give him answers.

Maka stills under his intense gaze, bullet poised between two of her fingers. "I'm not E.T., so quit thinking about it," she mutters uncomfortably.

This seems to bring Stein back to reality, or at least away from dissection pipe dreams. He gives his head a quick shake and retrieves an empty box, filling it with dried ammunition. Maka is left with the last bullet in her hand, the tip of it still drying.

She doesn't know what kind of gun it's for, and wonders if Harvey will use it. Or Tsubaki. Or one of the blonde sisters. She wonders if any of them will come back from the raid.

Stein's lab still faintly smells of infection and decay, though the cell in the middle of the room is empty. The doctor closes the full box and adds it to the little pyramid they've made on the table. Like all the others, he marks the box in patented, illegible doctor-scrawl. She'd asked what it said the first time he'd written the zombie death prescription.

Fire-Seeds. Something he'd read in the book he didn't choose.

 

* * *

 

 

The majority of the cured resistance, along with several willing volunteers of the survivor set, had left two days ago. She's left behind to supply blood for weapons. Soul stays as well, designing weapon prototypes.

"I call it the Grim Reaper," he says.

"Laaaaame," Black Star says from the other side of the room, but Soul ignores him.

Maka, still light-headed from venom donation, examines the weird-shaped thing made from hammered metal and colorful wires. She can't make any sense of it. "What's it do?"

"You twist it together," Soul says, making the motion above the device in his hand. "Then you throw it in the rain. Then it goes boom."

She eyes the blob of metal and tubes more warily. "...How big of a boom?"

"Got no idea. Not allowed to test it." He hefts it a little in his big palm, like lightly tossing a tennis ball that also happens to be meant for killing everything. "It's full concentrate," he says carefully. "All you in here." No water, no anti-cottage cheese.

"It's so little," she says quietly.

"You're little, too. Still mean."

Maka attempts to give him a venomous look, but it's not up to full par because a pint of it is in a little baggie in Stein's lab. "What are you trying to say?" she accuses.

Soul wears his little friendly smirk, which she hasn't seen since his brother's ghost had been brought to Hoover Dam. "Nothin'. Just that the shape doesn't matter, is all."

"I thought you liked my shape," she says, voice bored.

He's on to her, though. He slides into her personal space, initiating the boil-her-face voice. "I do like your shape. D'you like my shape?"

Maka shifts her eyes away, as if contemplating. Is this flirting? She thinks this is flirting. "Maybe." A lot, actually. The moment when he takes off his shirt before bed has become one of the highlights of her day.

"Jesus Mary Joseph and the _camel_ , go the fuck to lunch or something," Black Star groans irritably at the map with gradually failing cell towers. "Gonna make me puke."

She blushes, but bites back any particularly vicious comments. Black Star is worried about the raid, and Tsubaki hadn't spoken more than five words to him since the 'The Chapel' incident before she'd left in one of the trucks. "Don't I need an escort?" she asks.

Black Star sighs. "There's no one left but me or Stein. Just don't escort yourself off the fuckin' dam, okay bye."

She doesn't have enough time to finish thinking the word 'freedom' before Soul has her by the hand, pulling her to the hallway. She's not really hungry for lunch -- more nauseated than anything -- but Soul's hand is warm around hers, and if she just closes her eyes she can pretend they're somewhere else, like ninety percent of the world isn't other-dead, like maybe he's hurrying her to a movie theater for a cliched date. He's saying something, sounding kind of pouty and childish, like he's complaining about her earlier 'maybe' comment.

Maka stumbles. _Maybe it's the Tang_ , she thinks, thoughts swirling.

Soul's voice is worried now, and though she doesn’t hear what he actually says, she gets the gist of his question. "Tired," she explains. "Dizzy. From the--" _Fire-seeds_ , she almost says, but that's not the right word. She opens her eyes and waits for the hallway to twist into the correct alignment.

"C'mon. You should lay down." The dizzy spell is over, but she doesn't disagree with him. He leads her to their room, but instead of a hand at her elbow, his is on the small of her back, intimate and anchoring all at once.

Once in the room, he takes her knife and exchanges it with a bottle of water. She forces herself to drink a few gulps before melting into the mattress. The ceiling swirls a little, roiling.

She wants to apologize, because they finally got some time to themselves but she's falling asleep, and he's taking care of her again though it's been her turn for awhile now; he keeps trying to bait her to smile yet his brother is still newly in the ground, like being planted for harvest except he'll never come back.

What sprouts when you sow a fire-seed, she wonders. Ash? Anomalies?

 

* * *

 

 

Maka opens her eyes, the familiar hum of gigantoid generators thrumming through the walls. She doesn't know how much time has passed -- only that it has. She remains still and takes in the latest additions to the room.

Soul's enormous solar-paneled backpack has vomited fossils of the Old Age all over the small bit of floor that the air mattress doesn't occupy. Nestled amongst it, toes of his bare feet wiggling as he works, Soul is the cross-legged dragon surrounded by his treasures, quietly fiddling with wires and gadgets and what she's pretty sure is her phone. He carefully secures a wire to a piece of paper on the floor with a tiny sliver of tape.

Dark, familiar shapes she can’t immediately place are drawn on the paper. She closes her eyes, reversing those shapes in her mind so they face her direction. Piano keys, her brain churns out, except they’re all black and two-dimensional.

 

_I won't forget._

 

She doesn't know what he's doing, but she thinks he's attempting some Mountain Dew Geek Squad Voodoo to hold up his end of the deal, somehow. Maka opens her eyes again, watching his wiggling toes as his tongue peeks between his lips in concentration. Then she sees the can of still-labelled Spaghetti O's in the collection of artifacts.

He's getting ready for a date. An analytical part of her wonders why he's going through so much trouble, and comes up with the logical answer of 'he wants to get laid'. It kind of disappoints her, but she's never had sex and she's twenty five and the end of the world has already happened, so she kind of wants to get laid, too.

Still, there's a burning part of her that feels empty with this answer, and that’s when she sees the tiny jar of baby kosher dill pickles. She hadn't told him about her love of pickles, or how many she'd filched when Sid and Jacqueline weren't looking -- he had to have found that out on his own.

Her breath hisses out of her in a whispery laugh she can't keep held in.

Soul freezes, eyes flickering to her and finding hers open. "I, uh..." He shrugs a little. "There's no piano at Hoover Dam," he says. One of his hands is covered in more pieces of tape to be used on the paper keys, and he raises it to run his fingers through his hair, but awkwardly remembers he shouldn’t at the last second. "How're you feeling?"

A little hungry, a little aroused, a little amused. "Better."

The room doesn’t try to spin away when she sits up. She sips more water and finds Soul still carefully watching her; it’s as if he's reaching out, but not with his hands. She wishes he would.

"Say you picked me up for a date," she says, tilting her head.. "What would we do?"

Soul blinks a little, then looks back down to his project with a boyish smile. Maka anticipates him to paint an Old Age dream with dinner and the cliched movie theater, a drive home on his motorcycle while she wears his jacket, a kiss goodnight, and then probably some innuendo that will involve her inviting him upstairs to her apartment. But he doesn't say any of those things.

"Well first off, it'll be the best date you've ever had," he says. He takes another wire and sticks it to the paper, and the whole project reminds her of floss and tape.

"By process of elimination, that's not a hard title to earn," she blandly replies, placing the bottle of water on the floor and resting her hands in her quilted lap.

"Yeeeah, I'm kinda relying on that, actually."

"...Okay?"

He doesn't tell her about a rhetorical night together in the world that was. He tells her about something real, set in this world she intends to keep. "We'd go out on the town and, uh, _kill stuff_ ," he says, voice light as if what he's offering is legitimately attractive. "And we'd have the most sub-par picnic under a tree, and I'd give you all the s'gettios I can steal from the kitchen, and when you inevitably climb the tree I would try not to freak out. Maybe I’d even attempt to cl-- no I wouldn't. **But,** " he says, holding a tape-finger at her, "I wouldn't puke for the _whole evening."_

Maka slaps a hand over her mouth in an effort to stifle whatever noise it is that comes out of it. She shouldn't laugh, though she thinks the alternative is possibly cry, and she doesn't feel sad enough for that, for once. After she composes herself, she asks, "What then?"

Soul gives her a look that makes her cheeks heat up. He opens his mouth to say something doubtlessly perverted, but shuts it and regards the mess of wires and tape once more. Eventually he says, "I dunno if... you're the kinda girl that invites a dude to his own camp bed on the first date, so I'd leave that up to you." He gnaws on his bottom lip a moment. "Though, let's be honest, I would try to accidentally touch a boob at least once. That or your ass."

He only appears slightly guilty for having admitted that, removing the last piece of tape from his hand while the tips of his ears tint pink through his messy hair.

"My _ass?"_ she asks, skeptical.

Soul firmly nods. "S'very perky."

She scoffs. "I can't tell if you're being serious or not, again," she says, and her heart stutters when his gaze rivets on her. Despite the brightness of the room, his pupils bloom and expand, openly taking in her boring cotton shirt and quilt covered legs like she's the only one that can slake his thirst in the desert.

"I am," he murmurs. "Are you?"

Her legs break out in goosebumps under layers of fabric. "I'm always serious," she hazards.

Soul slowly grins. "Nah, I think you told a joke once. Something about--" His eyes fall away from her as he tries to recall anything funny she's ever said. He actually looks hard-pressed about it, and she considers throwing her water bottle at his face. "--pizza, maybe? I can’t remember, the fever fucked shit up--"

_"Soul."_

He's brought back to the situation at hand. "Speaking?" he offers with a nervous smile.

"Come here,"

Soul picks his way over techno wasteland and kneels on the bed. Maka grabs a fistful of his shirt and leans back, pulling him with her. He hovers on knees and hands, then knees and elbows, body lowering until it brushes hers, his lips ghosting over her face.

"I haven't played you a song yet, Maka," he sighs against her mouth, pressing into her hips when she threads her hands through his hair and tightly clenches it at the roots.

"Schedule change," she growls, bringing him in for a kiss. She tries to make the sparks in _him_ this time, sliding her tongue in his mouth and sweeping it across his. Her teeth scrape on his bottom lip and she's gratified when he growls back.

He pulls back and the mattress wobbles when he rips the quilt away from her, shoving it aside while she slithers out of her shirt. Soul gives her a heavy look before following suit and taking off his own. She's dragging her nails down his skin before he can toss the shirt away, moving her legs apart so he can rest between them.

Draping himself over her, he presses his face into her neck. Soul's hands slide up her torso, eagerly palming her breasts before sliding them back down to mold to her hips, squeezing and tugging her into him. "I wanna bite," he says or maybe warns her skin.

Maka swallows, imagining those piranha-wolf- _other_ fangs and squirming under the hard press of his cock through their pants. "I'm for it if you're for it," she breathes.

His hair tickles under her chin while his mouth closes over her throat. The wet warmth of his tongue tastes her a moment before she feels a sharp nip. Her breath hisses through her teeth. He pulls back a few inches, inspects her for any damage, and dives back in, pinching her harder this time. She gasps louder, toes curling. Her fingers dig harshly into his arms when he bites her a third time, her voice escaping in painful surprise.

"Sorry," he says, laving at her stinging neck while her body throbs with arousal. "Too much." He tries again, this time in a frustrating balance of pleasurable pain, having learned the limits of her skin under his teeth. She moans, writhing and bucking, her body demanding attention everywhere at once. Maka feels a smile growing on his lips with every mark he gives her.

"Soul, I want to, too." And with a quick whip of her body she's over him, blanketing his chest with her breasts and sinking her teeth into shoulder and neck and sinew.

His body jerks under her while he blurts an emphatic, _"Fuck."_ She tries teasing his neck closer to his jaw, tongue darting out to bring his earlobe between her teeth. Her bones rattle with his moan. Soul clasps his hands together, linking around the small of her back and reeling her in. The fabric of his pants rubs her bare skin, his erection digging into her stomach. Maka brings her mouth lower, across the expanse of his chest and over wiry abs as she slides under his hands and down his body, undoing his pants.

The hair is white down here, too. He's heavy on her tongue, wide and hard and _hard_ and god, she wants to know what that feels like buried in her. He stifles his voice when she lets the head of his dick kiss the inside of her cheek. Soul exhales her name as she licks and sucks, his thighs tensing under her hands.

"I wanna touch you," he manages to say.

She slowly removes her mouth, his flesh sliding across her lips. "Where?" she pants, breathless, and he pulls her back up to him, an arm snaking between their bodies.

He speaks in the softest of whispers, his cheek pressed against hers while his hand travels inside her pants. _"Your pussy, Maka."_ Fingers reach for her, spread her open, touch where no one else has touched. One delves inside, playing her for a few moments before another joins it, hooking her to his palm. "Until you're wet for me."

She squeaks, gasping, "I am, already--"

"More than this," he insists, rumbling with hunger. "More." His twining fingers prompt her to cry out, her clothes keeping his hand pinned tightly against her. She calls for him repeatedly, name not object, though maybe object, too -- she could lay claim to every soul in the world, right now. She calls his name until he'll never forget it, crashing against his hand and riding his fingers. Her pussy is molten when she comes, warmth spreading through her until she melts.

Soul helps her roll bonelessly to her back. She catches her breath, taking inventory with a palm: hard nipples, sweating stomach, damp, sensitive folds under thick denim. Soul finally shucks his pants all the way off; wrestles with hers until she’s bare. She lets her legs fall open to his warm, questing hands.

His eyes dart across her body a moment before he gently thumbs her clit. "I can kiss you here too," he eagerly offers, smiling as her body jolts with his touch.

Though the idea of his mouth does sound interesting, Maka reaches for his cock, trailing her fingers across the smooth tip. "I want to try this."

With a breath to steady himself, Soul moves and kneels between her legs, dick pointed to the ceiling as he leans back and rummages through the sea of backpack-innards next to the bed. Maka pushes herself upright with her hands, watching him rip a condom packet off an accordion lineup.

It occurs to her that she's naked with an equally naked man, but she has a distinct lack of nervousness because she has faced much scarier things than this. There is only anticipation in her, of waiting to be connected to someone -- someone who likes her and likes her freckles and steals pickles and plans post-apocalyptic dates for her and presses his forehead against hers after he rolls a condom on.

She aches for this man who knows what she is, who understands she's the weapon, the anomaly, but doesn't treat her like a commodity. She is those things, but she is also _Maka_ , a woman he is hard for, and when she climbs into his lap, he holds her hips to keep her steady, letting her sink over him on her own terms.

He kisses her chest, her neck, her face as she settles around him, but she’s hardly aware, too preoccupied learning about heavy, wide, hard and _hard, god, he is buried in her._ Soul holds her tightly, like she'll fly away if he doesn't, but he’s mistaken -- Maka clings because she'll drown otherwise.

"Please," she gasps, "please," though she doesn't know what she's asking, only that she wants anything he can give her.

He says her name. _"Maka,"_ he moans, fingers trailing across the scarring line to the left of her spine, feathering down her body until her ass is in his hands. He adjusts her, and she almost congratulates him for finally ass-groping her but whenever she opens her mouth she’s bursting through the ocean, gasping for air.

"Oh--" she pants, shifting her legs so her hips stir in his lap. He's so far in her that she kind of wants him out so she can feel him push in again. Maka lifts up a little, his hands following. She sinks back down, and he helps with that too. Soul holds them together while she rocks against him.

The air mattress wobbles, making everything pitch and reel in ways she doesn't expect. She clutches his shoulders, her hips no longer in her control, riding him because it she can't not. One of his hands gets lost in her hair and tilts her head, his lips smashing into hers, filling her with warm breath and sharp teeth and her name. "Fuck me, Maka," he says. "You won't hurt me."

Not understanding, she leans back to read his face. He looks drowsy with pleasure, mouth ajar, eyelids and pale lashes halfway hooded over red suns. When he sees her confusion, his hands grope down to her ass once more, pulling her, pushing her, making her move over him _harder_ , her mouth falling open with a hoarse cry.

Her voice is ripped out of her lungs until she's reduced to short, whimpering breaths. Dimly, she hears his groaned encouragements which abruptly switch to curses because she's coming on him, her body clenching and spasming around his cock without remorse.

Soul's hips flex and shift, canting with impatience, though his mouth plants relaxed, soothing kisses on her neck until her body is hers to control, again. He’s tense and eager under her, so she leans back with wobbly arms and legs, urging him to follow.

It's a different sensation having him plunge directly into her, to have her entire body jarred by his intensity, and though she doesn’t climax, she finds herself moaning along with him when he comes.

Skin slick and damp, Soul rests partly on her, an exhausted half-laugh leaving him when he unfolds his legs from around her. He stretches, sighing hot and humid against her cheek. "I have... the _worst_ leg cramp," he mutters, but he doesn't sound particularly in pain, which probably has something to do with endorphins.

"You should drink pickle juice," she says, feeling drunk, or maybe in free-fall, her entire body one giant firey pulse. A small giggle escapes her when he scoffs.

 

* * *

 

 

They sit naked with the quilt tangled around their shoulders like a broken tent. He makes a face after sipping from the pickle jar.

 _"Blegh-_ \- No, Sid said it that first night: _'Take your meds and stop stealing pickles, Albarn,'_ " he imitates the Major's low rasp. "I didn't even hafta steal them. Kid and some girl are runnin' the kitchen while Jack's out, and the girl was like, 'oh em gee, here take them' when I said they were for you. You have a fan."

Maka's face heats up and it probably matches the salty red sauce in her Spaghetti O's can. "...Did she have pigtails?"

"Yep. Blurrhg, so much _vinegar-_ -" He gives her a pathetic look and she reluctantly trades her soup can. The pickles are still crisp, though, so she doesn't complain. "What's the story with her?" he asks.

Hollow, with pickle still in her mouth, she replies, "She asked me to kill her brother." Memories of red streaking over neon flash behind her eyes, the Old Crone holding up Maka's hands for all to see. She swallows and turns to Soul, face expressionless. "I don't know what he looks like, so I promised I would cure them all."

Despite the jagged hair, the piercing eyes, the razor fangs, his face is somehow soft as he regards her. He doesn't tell her she can't kill everyone by herself, or that the burden isn't hers alone, or that he will help her until only breathers are the ones left standing in this world she intends to reclaim for humanity -- that gentle look tells her all these things without the words.

Soul sets the soup can on the floor and leans off the mattress to carefully drag his piano science project closer to him. The paper with the penciled-in keys is attached to two dozen wires that lead to a tiny blue chip board with so many connections that it looks like a multicolored squid. The squid is also connected to her phone, which he holds in his hand and plugs a tangled set of earbuds into.

He puts one earbud into his ear; hands her the other without ceremony. "Wes played violin when I was a kid," he says as if that explains everything, touching the phone’s screen and adjusting sliders and menus she's never seen before. He sets it aside and gingerly maneuvers the squid and paper to rest on the mattress with them. The piano has only twenty-four keys.

"I sucked at it,” he says. “But I wanted to do something with him, so he suggested the piano so I could be his accompaniment." Maka jumps when he touches a black key, a synthetic sound of a piano playing a note in her ear. "Piano made sense to me. It's like a _machine_ , with keys and pedals and hammers and whippens and... well, anyway. I figured it out. Played for all of his recitals."

A few more notes play in Maka's ear, slightly delayed from any given key-press, but still there. Soul’s hand is much larger than hers, but it has an unexpected litheness to it, moving with familiarity across the paper. She tries to block out the non-stop humming of the dam's generators, holding the earbud closer with a palm so none of the notes escape.

"How is this working?" she asks, transfixed as the little piano begins to play a melody she almost recognizes, graphite coating Soul’s fingertips.

"Stuff in pencils conducts electricity." It's part of Piano Man, she realizes. Billy Joel singing _'la la la di dee da'._ "The arduino -- that thing," he says, pointing to the squid, "with all the things -- picks up the signals and transmits them to a program I wrote to run off your phone." Piano Man morphs into a handful of songs she hadn’t known she even knew. Ancient melodies of the ruined world. "It sounds like shit, but it works, I guess."

 _ **"No,"**_ she blurts. When was the last time she'd heard music? "No. I like it." She sits very still, as if the notes would startle like little singing birds if she moves. Her heart aches and burns with song.

Soul picks out phrases of melody, some she can place, some she thinks he's made up on the spot. He slowly drifts away to wherever it is he goes when he's not in his body, taken along by memories of playing pianos somewhere else.

She thinks of Wes Evans, of his ghost's anguished cries of _brother, brother._

"How did you get your name?" she asks.

His playing falters, eyebrows furrowed. "It's dumb," he says, though the corners of his mouth curl up just the slightest. Soul slides the paper over so she can try it.

Maka hesitantly touches the keys at random. "Tell me anyway."

He moves closer to her so their bare shoulders touch. He tells her his parents didn't have a name for him when he'd been born. He was two months premature, lungs not fully developed, puny and runty and hooked up to machines.

"My brother was five, and Mom said that he was the one consoling her and Dad. He said that my soul was too strong to die, 'so don't worry.'" He sits and listens to her peck at the keys. "I lived, obviously. It wasn't a big deal -- doctors are used to that kinda stuff. Or were. But Wes was the one who named me, sorta." Soul faintly smiles. "I'd forgotten about that."

Maka inspects her hand, smudging the black graphite transferred to her fingertips. She doesn't tell him that Wes had been right, because how else could someone have lived so long with infection as Soul had? She doesn't tell him this is the best date she's ever been on. She doesn't tell him her father's name was Spirit, whose soul had burned so much for his daughter that he'd destroyed it to keep her safe; that when the gun went off in the closet was when she'd stopped hearing music.

 

* * *

 

 

She sees the black city again, little neon lights struggling to shine through the cage of undead skin that holds them in. They’re not runways or casino signs anymore, but something else, like glittering stars that seem to breathe on their own, glowing anomalies veiled by blackened decay.

The Old Crone knocks at the door, hoarsely saying her name.

Maka bolts upright, breath shuddering, and squints in the harsh light of the room. She reaches blindly for her knife but her hand collides into a body, instead. Soul is already awake, blinking owlishly and grunting from being accidentally punched. He drowsily grabs her hand to stop her from doing it again.

Someone knocks at the door. "Albarn, wake up." It's Harvey, she thinks, voice rougher than usual. She looks down and realizes she’s naked and on the wrong side of the bed. She's tangled in quilt and Soul, the room smells like sex, and one of them needs to answer the door.

"Just a second," she manages to rasp while she finds all of Soul's clothes and none of hers. Soul tosses her pants to her. While she struggles into them, bewildered by soreness in rather intimate places, Soul pats around the battlefield of techno gadgets for his phone.

She still can't find her shirt so she steals his and hauls it on, tripping her way across the unstable mattress to get to the door. She looks back at Soul, suddenly fearing how long they’ve been asleep, because he’s staring at his phone's screen, his thumb scrolling and scrolling and scrolling as his mouth carves into a stricken frown.

"Albarn, open the door or I will open it for you--"

She’s wrenching the door open with a sweaty hand on the lever just as she realizes the voice is low and raspy; Sid, not Harvey. Either way, the raid has returned, and the man looks even more undead than she'd thought possible. Sid is head to foot in black gore and exhaustion.

She says, "What happened."

He doesn't comment on her appearance or Soul's, the latter still very much naked and bruised, and she can only imagine what her own neck looks like. "Get to the lab. He's asking for you."

Someone's infected. She doesn't know why she's needed if Stein has so much of her blood on hand already, but she's being summoned, regardless. Maka hurries out of the doorway and turns for the lab, but before she gets far, Sid urges her with a quiet, steely voice that comes from the deepest part of people who have reached grim resignation.

 _"Run,"_ he says.

 

* * *

 

 

Jacqueline sits outside the lab, crouched with her back against a wall. The fire in her eyes seems bright with the dawn. She smells of blood and burning, her hair scorched short on one side and raw blisters forming on half her face. She gently holds something dark in one hand that Maka doesn’t truly recognize until she hurries into the lab and sees Harvey on a cleared-off table without his sunglasses.

His face is plain, but if she ignores the glistening red soup the majority of his abdomen has become, he might be considered handsome at certain angles. It's hard to ignore the soup.

Doctor Stein stands off to one side of the room, hands and arms red and black up to his elbows. He’s not in any rush to keep his patient on this side of the living. One look at the doctor and she knows -- though she doesn't want to believe it -- that there's no helping him.

Harvey swallows as she approaches, clearing his throat of blood. "Albarn," he says, breath wheezing out of him in a gravelly hiss. He swallows again, glancing at her neck. "Looks like Evans turned on you," he attempts to deadpan.

She schools her face into stone. "I live on the edge," she says, her bite marks benign while his are turning black around the edges. "What did you _do,"_ she demands, voice wavering despite all her effort.

"I tripped."

She's too alive to be emotionless anymore, eyes burning. “Clumsy.” She glances at Stein again, who isn't looking their way, lighting a cigarette. He sits on his cot and blows smoke into that familiar, unforgiving abyss.

"He's already saved me once," Harvey tells her. "I wanted to t--" He swallows again, blunt teeth a little more pointed than they'd been when she walked in. "Wanna talk to you."

She steps closer, one boot slick with blood that’s dripped off the table. She places a hand on his shoulder. He's burning through his shirt. "He didn't give you the antidote," she says.

He doesn't move his head, but his face shifts strangely, as if he's still accustomed to hiding behind sunglasses. "No sense in wasting it," he rasps.

The fire in her sings with frustration. She'll find out how Harvey had gotten himself into this mess, and she will add vengeance to her long list of promises. "I don't have much to talk about," she admits, breathing in the smell of his body dying. She watches the roots of his hair leaching from dark brown to grey.

That vague expression flashes again. "Wanted to tell you... when you're done with that Grim Reaper job, I hope you find the--" Only the top half of his body jerks as more of his hair burns white. "I hope you find the biggest vat of pickles," he gasps, _"and get fat."_ Her sarcasm rival is slowly dying, and what little composure she has twists into upended chaos.

She's not sure if she'll still be alive after 'the Grim Reaper job', but she thanks him just the same, flatly, as if she doesn't appreciate his wish for her to live.

"I have a favor to ask," he says, his normally expressionless eyebrows scrunching together in discomfort. "I'm gonna die."

She's heard this speech before, and she bites her lip in silence.

His voice is thick and wet. "Want to die human. Don't wanna come back." And Stein could have done this for him -- put him out of his misery -- but he'd wanted to talk to her first to wish her pickles and happiness in a world he’ll never get to see. He holds her gaze with unremarkable brown eyes, but the color seems so strange to her. "Please."

"It'll _hurt,_ " she warns.

"Get fat," he offers.

She tries to say, "Okay," but it's trapped somewhere between her heart and tears.

"Today, Albarn."

Her blood will kill him. The reaction is so violent it’ll cause what's left of his organs to seize and fail completely. Maka reaches for her knife at her hip; finds nothing there. Uselessness washes over her in a sorrowful wave as she realizes she'd left it in the room with Soul.

Then Stein is next to her, smelling of tobacco and blood. He presses the handle of a chill scalpel into her hand. Her fingers numbly curl around it. She cuts into old scabs and clenches her hand to squeeze blood out of them.

Until her promises are fulfilled, her fingers will never completely heal.

“Ah--” Harvey's wheezing grows violent. _"I understand now,"_ he whispers, eyes dilating, irises more burgundy now than brown. "Why they're drawn to you."

She brings her hand closer to his mouth like feeding a sick man, but one of his arms jerks up, weakly stopping her.

"Wait. One thing." His eyes forcefully peel away from her blood to her face. "There's a... a lotta people here, but I’ve never s-- No one has th'same as yours," he slurs.

He’s blurring in her vision, his hand searing through her wrist. "The same what?"

"Color. Color are y'eyes? Maka."

Fire burns down her cheeks. "Green."

His face smooths into a kind of clarity. "Like... the trees," he asks without a question mark.

"Mm. Like the trees," she replies. Maka sucks in a breath, trying not to lose her grip on her heart.

"He's lucky," Harvey says. He brings her fingers to his lips and drinks the cure. He doesn't scream.

Later, she learns he'd made the choice between running for cover or buying time. She thinks about his eyes, before they'd turned red, and with a sudden shock of understanding, she realizes why she hurts so much. He'd been like her: all sarcasm and dry humor, running on the fumes of promises to protect others.

And human. He'd never been one of the cured at all.

 

* * *

 

 

She’s hiding behind a generator when Soul finds her. He hands her her phone. She'd thought she was all cried out, but he sits with her, letting her soak his spare shirt with saltwater after she reads a message on her feed from @Shuttaz, because Black Star had made Harvey’s screen name for him and he'd never bothered to change it.

 

_**@Littlesparrow** lightning always looks carefully before it strikes #notblind_

 

Soul looks to her for a translation, but she has none to give. The message could be advice or an apology -- she has no way of knowing. She merely knows she’s burning alive, and she tells herself that even though her tally has gone up, she had spared Harvey from having to shoot his own face off.

 


	4. If in ashes the fire-seed slept

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Short bit of sexual content.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wes's cliff becomes the unofficial Mount Olympus cemetery, and Harvey is buried with two pairs of sunglasses.

 

* * *

 

She walks up to Liz Thompson in the middle of the tourist center-turned-armory and asks to be taught how to shoot a pistol. The survivors all around them pause only momentarily from their weapon production line.

Liz eyes her suspiciously, chilly blue eyes both piercing and distant, but Maka is more familiar with what’s behind that color, now. Having reached some kind of decision, Liz looks away, watching her younger sister hold a bit of metal steady while Jacqueline fastens it to the frame of a future bomb. She says, "I would, but we're not allowed to shoot here unless we gotta. We'd draw somethin'."

This is when the razor children, Claire and Castor, suddenly start banging their little hands on the bank of windows. They speak the babble of twins -- something that emulates English but not quite -- and they excitedly smash their fists against the glass. Watching them makes the little hairs on Maka’s arms stand tall. She can’t recall having seen either child be vocal about anything.

Marie hurries to the twins, attempting to calm them down and coax some words out. Four yards away, ShadowStag rises from the assembly line like a deer in the forest, standing very still as she gazes out the windows. The crowded room falls silent save Claire and Castor's frenetic tantrum on the window panes.

Maka’s nerve-endings spark when she watches Tsubaki take a deep inhale through the nose.

 _"Jack,"_ Tsubaki says.

Jacqueline looks grotesque and miserable with her half-inflamed face and seared left arm. Her voice is smoke and ash. "Red or black?" she asks, all business.

"Both."

Abruptly, Jacqueline begins barking orders to the room, standing and briskly walking to the kitchen. "I need everyone to stop what they're doing and take anything that has blood in it to the store room, and _quickly._ Set up a queue, just like at meals, and pass the weapons to the next person in line--"

Meanwhile, Tsubaki speaks into her collar, the room erupting in movement and noise. Maka swims through the mob of breathers, making her way to Marie, who has stopped trying to understand the razor twins.

The older woman lifts her eye patch and squints out in the distance, looking down the access road to the southwest. Maka follows her line of sight and catches a ghost of a blur that's difficult to discern in the early morning light.

"We need a lock down, get the defense model," Tsubaki reports. "At least one human, the rest... more than one. No visual, but they're coming from the southwest, straight up road. I didn't--" she falters, losing her ShadowStag identity and tumbling into the young woman with a permanent retainer and only five months of fighting experience. "We've got all sorts of Maka's blood down here, so I didn't realize it until--"

 _"You've bought us time. Lock it down, don't let any of that shit get exposed,"_ Black Star says over the crackling radio. Maka can hear him changing prostheses as he talks. _"Get security on Dr. Horrible and put some guns on the checkpoint,"_ he orders, snapping Tsubaki back into motion.

Marie hears these orders as well, and darts to the glass door that leads to Stein's lab. She has her own radio now- the one Harvey had used- and starts rolling up the sleeves of her shirt as she runs to the laboratory. Tsubaki pulls Liz and Patti Thompson off the lockdown line and recruits them for the checkpoint.

Maka heads to fill in the hole in the line so she can help pass half-assembled bomb bodies, but in the corner of her eye she sees the twins slip out the door Marie had gone through. Castor and Claire run _towards_ the checkpoint, their little legs carrying them straight for whatever it is that is coming to Hoover Dam.

Several others civs see them escaping as well, voices raised in alarm, and Maka drops the weapon in her hands and flings herself to the door. The muscles in her legs complain from her demands without any kind of forewarning, her lungs trying to remember what strenuous activity feels like. Halfway across the gift shop parking lot she catches one of the children, who kicks and screams wildly. There’s pounding footsteps behind her, and Maka looks up in surprise to see the other twin snatched up by Tsugumi.

Together they struggle with the squirming, flailing children, trying to get them back inside the building. As they reach the door, the one in Maka's arms strains for the checkpoint and suddenly screams in English.

Over and over, the child howls a bone-chilling **“** _ **NO,”**_ and to hear it is to see herself reflected. Maka stops in the doorway, unable to do anything but turn and look behind her.

In the distance, a dark-skinned man approaches in an exhausted, shuffling jog, followed by at least two dozen turned. Maka’s breath whooshes out of her, the feelings of fear and desperation she had quarantined to her days in the valley returning, unbidden, to press in on her from all sides. It has been weeks since she has witnessed so many heads of white hair and so many pairs of hungry eyes.

The child is taken out of her arms; someone yells at her to get inside the building. Maka can't rip her eyes away from the survivor still trying to outdistance the moaning mob tirelessly chasing him. Twenty yards from the checkpoint, the man stumbles, crashing into the asphalt.

Before she even makes the decision, she's flying across the parking lot once more, hurdling a short wall to get on the road and running headlong for the survivor. She hears more shouts and barked orders, but she doesn't make the effort to understand them.

As Maka vaults the bank of stolen road construction barrels that make up the checkpoint, she senses rather than hears someone flying with her. Worry seizes her heart, praying to every god that may be listening that it's not Tsugumi again, but it's Soul at her side, having caught up from the command center. She realizes it's Sid's and Black Star's shouts they are leaving behind.

They race to the fallen man, Maka unsheathing her knife though her brain insists on not running for a mob of walkers and turning the fuck around, instead. The man is drenched in sweat and gasping for breath, struggling to his feet as they reach him. Maka and Soul both grab under an arm and haul him upright. He leaves behinds bloody footprints -- he'd been fleeing the mob so long he'd worn off the last bit of sole from his tattered shoes.

"Trucks," he gasps out. "Saw the trucks, please, oh _god,_ _ **no--**_ _"_ he says, knees unlocking at the sight of Soul.

Soul grunts at the sudden extra weight. "Not gonna hurt you but they will so _move!"_

"We need to draw them away from the other civs," Maka says. "Let's get him to Stein's -- we can thin them out on the bridge."

The mob gains as they weave the man through the construction barrels. On top of the low roofline of the gift shop, Liz and Patti stand guard, the younger sister holding a pistol in either hand; the elder taking aim with Harvey's rifle. Suddenly, it's _Soul'_ s life Maka fears for instead of the unnamed survivor, so she urges them to go faster, lest Soul's white hair gets lost in a snowdrift of zombies.

Gunfire begins to sing. The three of them continue along the road, unshot, and Maka risks a backward glance to see most of the mob still change course for the civilian building despite their efforts. The scent of unfinished weapons are evidently more appetizing than the survivor's blood. A few do peel away from the main group to continue after them, however, so they keep course for the lab.

"Five o'clock, Maka!" Soul shouts over the gunfire, shifting more of the survivor's weight to himself as she whirls free of them, knife outstretched to the right. The blade sinks into undead flesh, though not as smoothly as she'd prefer. There's still a large nick in the metal that catches on clothing and ribs.

Maka pulls her weapon free and flits away, dancing around the walker and kicking it from behind to make it stumble. The zombie's back had evidently been the site of the mortal injury he’d suffered, because her boot nearly gets sucked into the festered, rotted wound. It throws her off balance and she ends up spinning awkwardly on one foot as she wrenches the other back from the walker. It pitches to one side, twisting and crashing into the ground. Maka scrambles for balance and swoops in after it, slicing across its neck, but the nick in the blade causes the knife to embed in its spinal column.

Not good. Not good, _not good, not--_ Maka pulls away, abandoning the knife and standing upright to rear back her leg and give walker a bone-shattering kick to the face.

She pries Gran's knife out of the finally unmoving body, looking up in time to see Black Star jump in the middle of three undead almost upon her, landing like an outrageous meteor. He wears a prosthesis that glows a blue as neon as his hair. It electrocutes the party of walkers, stunning them with involuntary muscle contractions, and buys Black Star enough time to shoot two in the forehead and pistol-whip the third.

Baller. Maka regards Black Star's prosthesis with new-found respect. She turns around to help Soul with the survivor, but finds neither of them where she expects -- the bleeding man is being helped into the lab by Stein himself, while Soul and Marie stand in the middle of the bridge to the building, defending as stragglers home in on the thick scent of blood wafting from inside.

Marie swings a long-handled _sledgehammer,_ sweeping aside two walkers like flies and toppling them off the bridge. Soul pulls his crowbar out from under the back of his jacket, eyes dilated and teeth bared, lashing out with the weapon like a sudden snake bite. Maka and Black Star join the fray, though Maka is forced to dodge more of Marie's earth-shaking swings than anything the walkers offer. She sticks closely to Soul -- he reads Maka's movements as easily as he does the turned -- and they watch each other's blind spots until only breathers are standing.

For several minutes they wait, the laboratory door propped open to lure any stray walkers to the bottleneck trap. Nothing shambles their way. Soul gradually melts to the pavement, crowbar dropping and hands pressed firmly against splattered concrete.

Marie worriedly asks if he's been injured. He shakes his head. Maka has seen him turn that pale color before, and she scoots closer to him so the edge of her leg touches his shoulder.

Then Black Star figures it out.

"Oh man." He begins to snicker. "Oh **man.** Are you scared of heights?!" At Soul's harrowed glare, Black Star tilts his head back to the morning sky and roars with laughter, as if the pile of bodies surrounding them are a field of daisies.

 

* * *

 

 

Claire and Castor refuse to be contained, wiggling their way out of Kid and Tsugumi's arms the moment the newest addition to #Resistance walks in on bandaged feet. Disbelief paints his face when he sees the twins, sinking to his knees. The children plow into him, all razor smiles and child-babble, and Kilik Rung grasps them protectively, shocked eyes taking in the tourist center filled with civilians and cured.

"What is this place?" he asks, and ShadowStag quietly introduces herself, Kid mediating when Kilik gets a better look at Tsubaki's eyes and the twins' teeth.

During the reunion, a hand wraps around Maka's elbow, dragging her away from the gathering crowd. For half a second she thinks it's Harvey, but then she remembers.

Jacqueline leads her to the kitchen, weaving around piles of half-finished weapons and jugs of diluted blood that kind of look like gallons of pink lemonade, except really not. "I'm starting to think you're just as much as an idiot as he was," she says, reedy and dry. She digs through an unplugged, waist-high deep-freezer used as storage, and picks a matte-black object out of it, placing it in heavily in Maka's hands.

Maka almost laughs, but refrains -- it wouldn't be the 'funny ha-ha' laugh but the 'everything has just become a little more inexplicably _insane_ ha-ha' laugh. The shitbag-pedophile's gun is in her hands, complete with the silencer that makes bullets whisper like ghosts. She's been given the weapon that put the Old Crone to sleep.

Jacqueline shuts the freezer and sits on it, looking irritable and pained. To Maka's dumbfounded silence, she says, "I heard you ask Liz. The silencer should let you practice without drawing more walkers to us, though I guess after this morning it's a moot precaution."

"...This hasn't been authorized, has it," Maka says carefully. Considering how long it had taken her to get her knife back, she can't imagine Mount Olympus happily gifting her with a _firearm._

Attempting to keep her singed hair out of the glistening inflammation in her face, Jacqueline sighs. "If they bitch about you having a gun, I'll tell them the truth and said you nose-dived into a damn mob with only a kitchen knife because _you're an idiot._ " And despite her coal eyes and the weird float of what's left of her black, weightless hair, her expression is painfully human.

Maka doesn't mention another idiot had similarly nose-dived into a mob armed only with hastily-made explosives to help bring a friend home before he died.

"I don't know what he said to you," Jacqueline says, "but if Harv trusted you, I'll have to trust you, too. Do us all a favor and try not to die."

 

* * *

 

 

Her palms blister from digging. She embraces the sores, as it means twenty-seven more souls have been sent to the deep sleep. It's sad to make graves, but good, too. Her father only went to sleep in a coffin of sweaters and leather jackets.

Liz and Patti teach her to shoot her ghost-killer, and the blisters pop and throb. It's the fault of the rough, over-sized grip, but the fact that the weapon came from a man she'd murdered makes itself known through the pain in her hands.

"For God's sake," Liz tells her, "don't let guts get all up in it. If it jams, you're dead, your fam's dead, your boy's dead. Everyone."

"I'll keep it clean." She thinks she might like Liz, or at least the way the woman prioritizes. Maka sips her Tang as the three of them regard the empty shell of a geek-squad-gutted mini fridge she'd been using for target practice.

"At least they all hit," Liz offers, eyeing the vague grouping of bullet holes.

"Those 'seeds' should work as long as you get 'em somewhere," Patti adds.

"Should," Maka echoes, Tang staining her lips as she wonders if Prometheus knows how to control the fire.

When she's done with target practice, she's put back on weapon assembly, sore hands memorizing thee monotonous rhythm of attaching the same length of tubing to the same piece of metal. She concentrates on this until she can't think about mobs and graves anymore, though her knife feels heavier on her hip, as if the weight of blood still glazes it.

She's released from duties when someone qualified to escort her finally has some free time, which is well after nightfall. The blue-haired monkey-god himself blearily accompanies her to her room. "Will those weapons actually _work?_ " she asks.

"If they don't, I've sent four civs to death by either infection or starvation," Black Star replies, looking less of a star and more of the messy nebulous nova aftermath, dark matter staining under his eyes. He might be out of caffeine pills already. "Gonna test a few on Boulder, tomorrow. Our Marathon man said that's where he picked up all those walkers."

Boulder is/was a small city between Hoover Dam and Vegas, and had once been a sought-after retirement retreat. Considering the possibility of how many senior citizens could have easily succumbed to the virus there, she hollowly says, "Lots of test subjects."

Black Star grunts in disgust. "You sound like Stein."

She can't deny it, and she’s too tired to try. "Get your blood drawn as often as I do, and you would too." Once they’re outside the civilian building and crossing the street to where the command center resides, Black Star's prosthetic foot goes eerily silent. Maka keeps a hand on her knife handle, conscious of the weight of the ghost-killer gun tucked in her jeans.

It still smells like undead rot outside. She’s reminded on the attack today, of the rush of fear in her blood as she ran directly towards a mob of the turned. She wonders if her fear had been clear on her face, or if she'd been how she imagined Harvey: expressionless as he carefully struck.

They reach the other building without incident.

To help save civilians he had essentially sent to their deaths, Black Star had organized a raid for the tools to save them, and Harvey had died to help that raid succeed. With no cafeine to blur the weight of his decisions, Maka thinks this may be why Black Star physically looks how she feels.

If he had his own Old Crone following him around, she wonders what it would say as it haunted him.

Without thinking, or perhaps as a result of thinking too much, she asks, "What happened at The Chapel that makes Tsubaki angry?" Though 'angry' isn't the correct word. Maybe infuriated. Infuriated and so scared that the woman lost her shadow, as pale as Soul on a bridge. "Was that where she was infected?"

The long hallway to her room stretches on, painted a heartless gray that becomes darker with the look on Black Star's face. "No. It's where I abandoned her." And he says nothing more on the subject. He doesn't speak again until they're outside the door of the supply room that serves as her 'apartment' with Soul. "Get some sleep. It's kinda under the table, but I'm taking both of you tomorrow."

Maka’s hand pauses on the door lever. _“Us?”_ she asks stupidly.

"Y’all might be insane, but you can hold your own, and that’s all I give a fuck about. Besides,” he says, looking as dead as all of Vegas, “it’s not like Harv and Jack can go.”

Her mouth goes dry. So, the two of them are the replacements for a dead man and a burning woman. She doesn't want to think too much about that; would do anything to have never thought it at all.

Black Star adds, “Speaking of, gimme the rest of those pills. Unless you ate them all like an addict."

"...Which one of us is the addict?" she accuses, clinging to emotionlessness.

He rolls his bloodshot eyes. "It's for _Jack_. I don't need that shit. Pain is nothing."

Maka attempts an unconvinced look before opening the door. She finds Soul inside, sitting on the bed, hands paused over another techno monstrosity, and she’s surprised to realize some hollowed-out part of her had not expected to see him here. She exchanges untranslatable eye contact with him for a moment before she walks in and numbly retrieves Dead Person's Vicodin prescription bottle.

When she hands it to Black Star, he asks, or maybe suggests, “You’re done with these.”

She's been off the pills for days. Maka raises her chin. "Pain is nothing," she replies. She thinks maybe it's a lie, though -- pain is so much _not_ nothing that it's mind-numbing in its consuming grasp. Black Star gives a tired snort, and she hears herself suddenly asking, "Do you not like sleep?"

He greets Soul wordlessly over her shoulder with a nod of his head. Then quietly, with volume control she hadn’t believed he possessed, he replies, "I like sleep. Just don't like people dying while I do it." He turns back down the hall and disappears into the gray. "Sharpen your butter knife," he calls.

Maka shuts the door, leaning on it and trying to gather her wits. Going on a raid was what she’d wanted, what she still wants more than anything, but too much has happened today, or the past two days, or the past five months. Too many deaths. Too many undeaths.

Soul appraises her current state of being, his assessment making him reach out with his eyes in concern.

"We're going on a raid tomorrow," she says numbly, placing two murder weapons on the floor near the tangled blob that is Soul’s paper piano. He sets aside whatever prototype he'd been working on to the floor as well, leaving himself open and approachable. She says, "I need to sharpen my knife," cautiously allowing herself the scarce comfort of crawling on the bed and wrapping her arms around him.

Maka feels empty, a jar with only dregs and ash at the bottom.

She hopes the weapons work. She hopes she can help everyone sleep. She hopes, if she lives through the Grim Reaper job, that she'll find a vat of pickles and get fat, and when she gets ready for bed at the end of the day, Soul will still miraculously be there like an unexpected surprise, waiting, breathing, alive. She hopes a lot of things, and every consecutive wish feels more selfish and unlikely than the last.

"You're shivering," he tells her, holding her tight. Distantly, as if watching herself from outside her body, she realizes she's terrified. Her heart doesn't whisper anymore, and her body trembles from all the screaming.

 

* * *

 

 

Sid is not pleased to see her in the back of the van. He bores holes into the side of her head with his nearly-undead gaze, so she looks to her partner in crime for back-up. Soul’s eyes dart away -- he hadn’t wanted her to leave the dam either, even if he hadn't said it aloud.

"You ignored orders," Sid says, skipping right to the subject, pitched only for her to hear. "And recklessly endangered yourself."

Maka sighs in acknowledgement. She could argue that Soul had been right there with her, but she knows what he's trying to say -- her blood makes her important. She's aware, but she had watched Kilik fall, and she could not stand still and watch a man die because her life was somehow 'more important' than his. There is fire in her blood, and it won't let her sit idly.

They pass underneath a tall bridge and a blurry memory flashes in the corners of her mind-- a dream of bright stars burning into her eyes, of her blood burning in a forge.

"I'm the kind that fights to live," she says.

Sid attempts a grudging frown. "I hope you're also the kind that follows orders in the future, Albarn, 'cause if you can't you'll be endangering a lot more people than yourself."

She knows. Maka nods, if only because she has a lot of promises left to keep.

The trip to Boulder isn't really a 'raid'. It's a quick experiment with an opportunity to hit a nearby convenience store. They make a risky run inside a 7-Eleven outside of cell tower boundaries. There's not much in it, but Soul and Black Star collect deep-freezer air compressors, and Maka finds several boxes of Mountain Dew fountain syrup that may have to compete with Tsubaki for Black Star’s affections. Sid discovers a pallet of tiny jars filled with expired baby food.

"Looks like no one will eat these even if the world is ending," he says, nauseated.

"Let's take them anyway," Maka says. "Jacqueline can find a use for the jars."

Black Star scoffs. "She'd just fill them with explosives." After a moment, he adds, "Not that I'm complainin'."

"Or we could fill them with blood," Soul says. "Give something the civs can use without exploding each other while we’re gone to The Strip."

Tsubaki pokes her head inside the convenience store door, face carefully blank. "Wrap it up, there's too much black here. We need to get out of the suburbs."

After the 7-Eleven, they make a slow drive-by of the Boulder City Hospital, but there are so many heads of white hair scattered in the parking lot that they don't bother trying to raid it for supplies. Sid clucks his tongue in the back of his throat.

They travel to the edge of town. Parked at an overgrown baseball diamond, Tsubaki climbs on top of the van, violet eyes refracting the mid-morning sun. The cured breathes in deeply several times, gaze focused on an assisted living complex across the street. Black Star, sitting in the driver's seat, props his prosthetic foot on the dashboard, occasionally checking the side mirrors for anything approaching. Soul dangles his legs out the sliding side door and sits very still save his blown-pupil eyes, which dart to every swaying palm tree and blade of shifting grass.

Sid sharpens Maka's knife for her, because he'd told her she was ruining the blade the way she'd been doing it. For some reason the man has his own whetstone on him, so she thinks he may be a knife kind of guy, too. She watches him carefully run metal across stone, counting the strokes so he can make the same amount on the other side. He erases the nick in the blade, though her memory of it still catches on things when she looks for where it used to be.

After a while, Tsubaki says, "Okay."

Black Star digs around in a reusable grocery bag and pulls out a metallic purple canister that looks like it had made the rounds of both Stein's lab and the geek squad. He hands this to Maka, who had stolen Tsubaki's passenger seat in the front of the van.

He says, "You're up, Sharkbait."

"Sharkbait," she murmurs to herself, confused. She cradles the plastic and metal monstrosity in her hands, opening the van door to let herself out.

Black Star yawns, rapidly tapping things in his phone. "Have you _seen_ your neck? Seriously."

She slides out of the tall seat and her feet reach the grassy field, and it takes everything in her body to not slam the door and cause a noise that could draw everything in a five block radius. Maka leaves the door wide open, shooting Soul a venomous look over her shoulder.

His sneakered feet knock together once, still dangling out the side door. Soul sucks his lips into a tight line, as if trying to not say something smart-assed but ultimately failing. "My bad."

Maka stomps to the pitching mound, placing the suspicious _whatever-it-is_ on the ground. She looks back at the van, and Soul gestures to flip open a lid on the thing and press a button.

She finds the button, a bright red, ominous thing she would rather not press while standing so close. Apprehensive, she scowls at the rest of the team. Black Star waves his monkey hands, urging her to hurry up and just do it.

If the damn thing explodes and covers her with her own pink lemonade blood, she's going to dump all the Mountain Dew syrup into the Colorado River, Black Star’s caffeine addiction be damned. She presses the button.

 _ **"I wish I was like six-foot-nine so I could get with Leoshi 'cause she don't know me, but yo she's really fine,"**_ the purple canister blasts at startling levels. _**"You know I see her all the time, everywhere I go, even in my dreams I can scheme a way to make her mine."**_

Maka runs back to the van (admittedly confused, but running just the same), and Tsubaki slides off the roof and back into the front seat. Soul scrambles inside, shutting the door when Maka jumps in. Black Star mouths lyrics while starting the engine, creeping away from the device in reverse. "We're gonnaaaaa get outta range."

 _ **"I wish I was a little bit taller, I wish I was a baller, I wish I had a girl who looked good, I would call 'er,"**_ says the blood weapon, luring any nearby undead with a baffling siren call which Soul seems to find hilarious.

"This is either gonna be a complete failure or the coolest thing ever," he chokes out.

Sid passes Maka her sharpened knife and not looking the least bit surprised, even if he were able to look surprised. "You kids are crazy,"

"Shut up this is my jam," Black Star says, putting the transmission in drive and idling the van while the tops of Tsubaki's ears flush a little.

Walkers beeline for the baseball field, filing out from the shadowy corners of the assisted living complex and crossing the street. The raid frequently checks all the windows for any of the turned sneaking up on them from other directions, but Tsubaki had called the area correctly. A mob thrice the size of the one that had attacked Hoover Dam the day before shambles onto the grassy baseball diamond, hearing the noise and smelling their presence. They begin to pass the device, losing interest in lieu of the running van, but Black Star waits. His thumb hovers over a button lit up on his phone's screen.

"Black Star," Tsubaki warns as more of the mob passes over the weapon and walks closer.

_**"Shimmy shimmy ya shimmy yam shimmy yea--"** _

Black Star grunts. "I'm watchin'." The air in the van is tense and electric as the seconds pass.

_**"-my producer slam, my flow is like bam, jump on stage and then I--"** _

The world falls into an abrupt hush a split second before a shockwave plows through the atmosphere. Maka's lungs seem to crumble in her chest. Her fingers dig into seat cushions as the van rocks, and she doesn’t hear the suspension squeak like it should.

"-- _rist_ , you put enough _shit_ in there?" Sid shouts, though it sounds like a whisper sifting through mountains of thick fog and folded cloth.

"Yeah, I think so!"

Maka reaches for Soul, disoriented. He's grimacing, but he's still there, cautiously re-opening the sliding door. Sound slowly filters through her ringing ears, and she hears a groaning chorus of final words, smoke and the smell of blood permeating the air.

The mob convulses in a big mass, like some deep sea creature electrified, burning through from the inside. Any stragglers that had somehow been shielded by the blast reach for the nearest splotch of blood spatter, eagerly seeking their own poison.

Black Star holds his open hand towards the carnage as if presenting art. "It appears to **work,** " he announces.

 

* * *

 

 

"Did you really punch himr in the face?" Soul asks as he showers.

She's not supposed to be left alone, but they hadn't seen any of the radio-collared babysitters nearby when it was Soul's turn to bathe on the schedule, so she'd followed him. She sits on the bathroom’s sink counter, watching his skinny toes get soapy with lather runoff on the other side of the shower stall.

"Maybe," she says.

His amusement echoes in the bathroom. "What'd he do?"

"He said 'who the fuck punches a god in a wheelchair' or something. Honestly, I didn't realize he was missing a leg at the time -- all I could think about was watching you waste away to bones while that monkey dyed his stupid hair blue."

Water hits tile for a while before Soul offers, "He was busy with The Chapel."

 

_It's where I abandoned her._

 

"Do you know why The Chapel is _'The Chapel'_?"

"Kinda, maybe." The water cuts off and he steps out of the steaming stall, only about eighty percent pulling off the casual 'you could stab me dead' air. She absently imagines what his hair color might have been, before, but decides she doesn't care. She looks behind colors. "I got ten minutes left on my time... You could take one, if you wanted," he says, leaving the 'it might be your last one in ever' unspoken.

She feels weird being dressed while he's drying himself with a towel, anyway. She takes off her knife and gun and wonders if they'll have sex again tonight; if that's an okay thing to do, or if it's too close to admitting they're afraid of never getting another chance. Though what kind of person is she to be thinking about sleeping with someone when she has so much debt and so many promises to keep? Maka takes off her clothes, confused about being a breather.

Soul takes her spot on the counter, wet hair clinging to his scalp. He gives her body a hot glance that she thinks she had probably given him a minute ago, and Maka breathes despite everything, retreating into the shower stall.

As warm as his eyes had been, his voice is distant and sober. "I heard it happened like five minutes after he gave us the co-ords to the library." He tells her how Tsubaki had been too weak to continue to Prometheus, how two other raiders, Ford and Diehl, had stayed behind in The Chapel with Tsubaki while Black Star, Harvey, and Jacqueline had continued to get to Stein.

"It was his old lab. He was trying to move his patients and whatever else here, but then those three showed up. Something went down, both at the old lab and The Chapel. I dunno what really happened, but you've seen Stein's face. And Tsubaki's scars on her neck."

Maka feels for the ridged scar tissue left of her spine, remembering Tsubaki’s permanent retainer smile. ShadowStag has scars on more than just her neck -- they spread across her shoulders and down her body like something had been trying to claw her apart for something it had never found.

Maka feels a little guilty for punching Black Star. But not guilty enough that she wouldn't do it again if presented the same situation. He's still obnoxious.

She showers quickly, and when she steps out of the stall she finds Soul clothed. He has also donned such a conflicted face that it doesn't allow her to feel remotely sexual being naked in front of him. With a quiet sigh, she takes his damp towel. "Just say it, already."

"I don't want you to go tomorrow."

Maka pushes water around on her skin with the ineffective towel. "I'm going."

"I know."

"I have promises to keep."

"And I'm gonna help you keep them," he replies just as easily. "I wanna just... keep you here, keep you _safe_ , so you stop putting yourself at risk--"

Maka sighs again, irritated with this already. "Soul--"

 _"Just shut up,"_ he hisses, teeth gleaming. More softly, he tells her, "If you didn't take risks, I'd probably still be up in that tree. So I'm not gonna stop you. I'm not gonna... try to change you. I'll go with you."

Body still wet but putting on her pants anyway, she says, "You don't have to help me." It's a lie, though. They're two parts of a blade, forged together by lightning. She doesn't think she can keep her promises without him. She doesn't want to.

Soul quietly scoffs. It's a humorless noise. "You don't have to save the world."

No, but she wants to keep it. Maka dons her shirt, replacing her weapons. "I'm going to."

"Now you get it,” he says, hand outstretched and grazing hers, and she sees it in softness of his not-soft face: he wants to keep her, too.

 

* * *

 

 

His backpack is filled to the brim with tools and gadgets and bombs, all tightly mashed together in a Tetris array for the next day. They share Spaghetti O's as a last supper, though she washes it down with Tang under threat of her gun privileges being revoked. Thunder nudges the dam, barely heard over thrumming turbines.

Once in bed, her back is cradled against his chest, his hand running down the wing-stump scar in discordant reverence because he blames himself for her injury but it had been her injury that cured him. Maka mewls, gasping as he enters her from behind. His mouth wetly kisses her spine, her neck, her cheek. She arches in pleasure, reaching back to grasp his hip and shove him closer to her.

They have sex slowly, intently, until it's impossible to hold back, and when they're finished they rest a while and do it again. This time it's not slow, but raw and hard and senseless, and when he says her name she thinks she can almost hear its meaning.

Afterward he tells her, during his endorphin high, that even if she hadn't been the cure, even if she'd killed him in the library when he turned on her, he would still relive this hell a thousand times as long as she found him in that tree.

It sounds like a goodbye, and she hates him for it.

 

* * *

 

 

Before they'd left, Tsugumi had given her one last gift from the residents of Mount Olympus. The girl had told her it was strange for Maka to not have at least one, all things conseidered. Maka holds it in her hands as she sits in the back of the van, like clutching an egg with her fiery DNA sloshing around inside -- a baby food jar filled with pink lemonade, faintly shining from the dawn light struggling through dark clouds.

As the engine of the van she, Black Star, and Sid are in sputters and dies, she's thankful that Tsugumi is safe back at the dam. She also fervently wishes she was with Soul on one of the other teams. _He's lucky,_ Harvey had told her, and she's starting to think he'd been right.

"Hang on to something," Sid says, even as he continues vain attempts to restart the engine. "Get ready to take everything you can get away with."

"Keep going, we'll catch up," Black Star barks into the radio before the other vehicles are out of range. He unbuckles his seat belt as Tsubaki's voice crackles with dismay, her words garbled. The van rolls to a stop.

“We’re sitting ducks,” Maka flatlines, clinging fiercely to false resignation instead of the encroaching panic lighting up her nerve endings.

Sid buttons the collar of his jacket. “Sure’d be nice if we had some _foggers_ right about now.”

“Psh-- don’t play like your blue smurf face didn’t light up at the thought of bombs the other day,” Black Star sneers, edgy.

They come in like a tidal wave, a tsunami of restless corpses, and Maka wonders for a moment if this helplessness is what Harvey felt before he ‘tripped’. The horde of bodies overturns the heavy van, supplies and crates of blood bombs crashing to one side. Sid braces himself in the driver's seat while Black Star and Maka shuffle and climb arm rests like a calculated circus act -- it's like branch-hopping for her, and if she wasn't only a metal shell away from death, she'd probably enjoy herself.

Black Star double-checks the latches on his prosthesis; looks to her. "You good?"

Balancing on an armrest, her fingers make cursory touches to her knife handle and the ghost-killer. Maka zips up the leather jacket Jacqueline had found for her. "I'm fine. What's the plan," she says, stooping to gather stray weapons and attempting to find room in her already-full canvas bag.

"If you have any vendettas, forget them right now," the false-undead says, raising his voice to be heard over the loud banging from the mob outside. The windshield begins to shatter from the pressure of zombies dog-piling the vehicle. Sid loads a short barrel shotgun with ammo from a box with Stein's handwriting. "We're six blocks from Luxor. We get out of this mob _fast_ \-- no glory stunts -- and meet with the others."

"Imma blow this shit up," Black Star says, reaching up for the tilted glove-compartment over Sid's head and pulling out another one of his prostheses. He presses a button that looks like it'd been ripped off an old arcade game, the embedded speakers spewing a slew of lyrics from R.E.M.'s 'It's the End of the World as We Know It'. Maka would like to comment on his strange taste in self-destruct timers, but he says, "We got two minutes," before shooting a Beretta into the windshield. Her ears throb and a fire-seed flies through the glass to burn up a walker.

Sid kicks the rest of the glass down, shards crumbling into little glittering pellets. He shoots birdshot -- _fireshot --_ into the wall of undead flesh squeezing to come inside.

 _ **"World serves its own needs, listen to your heart bleed, tell me with the rapture and the reverent in the right. Right,"**_ says Black Star's discarded prosthesis, echoing in the back of the van while the three of them hurdle over the steering wheel and through the broken windshield, stepping on burning bodies and charging into a wall of infection.

There aren't enough bullets in the world for The Strip. Gunfire mows a weak path through the zombies, Maka's blood searing through the turned only to be replaced by more heads of white.

_**"It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine~"** _

Maka darts behind the two men, diving after stragglers and keeping her promises with Gran's knife. In her peripherals, she’s ever-aware of the undulating ocean undead pressing in around them, of the Welcome to Paradise sign from what seems like a lifetime ago. This is the place where they shouldn't go, yet have anyway -- for breathers they don’t know; for breathers who’d died to save them. It's probably unhealthy amounts of adrenaline that kind of makes her want to laugh about it, but she refrains, because it would be that 'insane, ha-ha' kind again -- maybe with the leather jacket she has truly become the biker gang crazy bitch.

_**"Offer me solutions, offer me alternatives, and I decline!"** _

Her arm is starting to tire, her wrist cramping from cutting through stubborn tendons and sturdy vertebrae though her blade is as sharp as the day she'd taken it from Gran. Her eyes strain to see in the muted daylight, bright splotches of gunfire dotting her vision.

Sid goes through five shots and runs out of ammunition, so he tucks the gun in a leg holster and pulls out his own set of combat knives, carving his way through the crowd. Black Star is as nimble as the monkey Maka had figured him to be despite a false leg -- and sometimes, she thinks, _because_ of his leg -- punching, kicking, shooting, and tasering a path free.

Nothing is fine when the end of the world comes, feeling that queer microsecond of silence before the atmosphere explodes behind them. She’s a ragdoll against it, and she collides into the ground like running headlong into a wall.

Maka's ears ring painfully, the heavens twisting as she stumbles her way back to her feet. Black Star looks like he's cackling, continuing to shoot the zombies around them that hadn't been leveled in the blast, but his open mouth is like a silent film. She looks back through watering eyes at the flaming heap of metal and flesh behind them, everything tinged a dusty wet pink from all the leftover blood weapons.

"We have to go," she shouts, unsure if she can be heard when she can barely hear herself. "They'll come for the blood!"

"That's the plan," Black Star mouths, and the three of them hurry north, the buzzing in Maka's ears slowly fading.

 

* * *

 

 

She can't tell if it's thunder or the other raid teams causing their (decidedly more planned) distractions rumbling around the city. She's sweating buckets under her jacket as they dash by Mandalay Bay, but the leather had saved her multiple times from being torn into by fangs, so she keeps it on.

Her bag is already considerably lighter; the amount of weapons they had to use to get six blocks was a lot more than she'd anticipated. She stops using them once they close in on The Chapel, as to not lure walkers away from all the other distractions the other teams are providing.

The Chapel is actually 'The Chapel at Luxor' -- Luxor being the huge, misplaced monument to the past set in an age that has also passed. The building is a gleaming black and copper monster of glass, constructed in likeness to the pyramids of Giza, complete with a reclining sphinx. Like a giant dagger pointing to the sky, a hieroglyphic-etched obelisk marks the hotel on The Strip, as if the pyramid wasn't obvious enough.

The hotel's interior is a spacious atrium that takes cues from the Luxor temple in Egypt, with tall sentinel statues and seated pharaohs, though presently the hotel is mostly decorated in a battlefield of black blood and snowy hair, smelling of infection and gun smoke. The pyramid has served its purpose as a tomb for the past five months.

She’s vulnerable. She has no weaponized fake leg, no military experience. She has no infection-enhanced talents like Tsubaki's sense of smell or Soul and Marie's hunting cat eyes. She has the antithesis of undead in her blood, granted, but she'd prefer to keep the majority of her blood _in_ her body, if possible. Maka has a kitchen knife and gun that had once been shoved under her chin, and she's walking into a dark tomb with Tang-stained lips, ringing ears, and a bag half full of her weaponized blood that a part of her brain is constantly reminding her is actually a bunch of **bombs** that she shouldn't jostle too much.

They follow the trail of bodies Tsubaki's team had left behind, the space dim and full of shadows. Maka spies gunshot wounds, shattered faces, and evidence of what could only be Marie’s sledgehammer. She tries not to waste time attempting to identify all the white heads on the ground, hoping that Soul hadn't done anything stupid like drop his crowbar off a flight of stairs or something.

The marbled floors of the lobby are slick with black blood, and Maka picks her way around corpses as she follows Black Star, Sid trailing behind her. They stop frequently, pausing and listening before walking through dense areas of statues, dying plants, and disheveled souvenir shops. Black Star leads them up a staggered flight of stairs that ends right next to a pale building with an unlit sign announcing it as _The Chapel at Luxor_ that Maka can barely see in the gloom.

They turn the corner of the building to find the doors broken, glass scattered all over the floor. Black Star does not seem surprised by this, so Maka holds her tongue for sending people into 'safe' places with _glass doors._ The man steps through the broken door frame, readying his gun. Glass crunches under her boots when she follows. Sid huffs uncomfortably, trying to squeeze through the small door, but he makes it inside, too.

The three find themselves in a long hallway of beige marble and cream paint, decorated with the occasional body. A chandelier tilts awkwardly from the ceiling. Quietly, Black Star takes them down the hall to a door that is already ajar -- something that he _is_ surprised about. He toes it open, revealing a carpeted room with cushioned wooden chairs thrown about like shrapnel.

In the middle of the room stands Marie, eye patch flipped up, sledgehammer poised in both hands.

Black Star lowers his gun, scoffing. Tsubaki and Soul each slide out of their own shadowy corners, weapons lowering. The room nearly trembles in relief.

"I didn't want to radio you, in case--" Tsubaki starts.

"We lived, it's cool," Black Star says as if their survival hadn’t been an absolute miracle, eyes darting around the room.

Nothing looks more out of place than flowery carpets and cream linens dyed brown with old blood. The chapel's podium is sandbagged with bodies at its base like the leftovers of a sacrificial rite.

Maka weaves around toppled chairs to Soul who, covered in walker blood and gore, looks startlingly similar to when she'd first met him in a tree. His eyes are almost as dark as Jacqueline's, and he doesn't back away when she approaches, this time. He says nothing about seeing the van she'd been in get swarmed by an undead undertow, but his worry for her is clear on his face.

She stands at his side, taking another look around the chapel. Apart from the six of them intruding like a pack of dirty, armed animals, the room is empty. There are recent signs of habitation: the smell of urine and vomit, empty food cans, the haphazard pallet of stained curtains as bedding.

If they won't say it, she will. "Where are the civs.”

"You sure you sent them here?" Sid asks, though he doesn't sound particularly doubtful.

Black Star's eyes dart to Tsubaki for half a second. "Of course I'm sure," he growls.

"The door was unlocked when we got here," Marie says.

Maka supposes the civs got tired of waiting. If Black Star had sent her and Soul here instead of the library, she would have ditched, too. The longer they stand here, the more her skin crawls. She wonders if any of the blood on the walls is Tsubaki's.

"I had to fucking blow up the van. They have to be here," Black Star says. _Harvey died for this,_ he doesn't say.

"If they're gone, they're gone," Sid tells him. "We'll sweep on the way out."

The raid cautiously picks through the building, leaving The Chapel and circling around, searching for signs of life. As they pass a display of a dusty Corvette that had never been won by the gamblers of old, a half-imagined sense of movement passes overhead, the hair on the back of Maka’s neck standing on end. She looks up just in time to see several walkers, roused from stasis by their presence, hurl themselves into the air from the closest set of interior balconies.

It's raining zombies. One crashes into the Corvette. More smack into the marble floor after glancing off the smaller indoor shops. Marie is the first to make contact, swinging her sledgehammer into one before it can lurch back on its feet. Another walker lands an arm’s length away from where Maka stands, so it gets a bootheel to the neck.

The team ends the skirmish quickly, staring upward and waiting for more of the sickening sounds of heavy flesh colliding into the unforgiving floor. Everyone looks nauseated from the ordeal, though Sid always kind of looks that way. Nothing comes, but before they move on, Tsubaki whirls on them, tense.

"Who was bitten?"

After a silence, Soul says, "...Is this a trick question?"

Irritation briefly flits over the woman's face before she shakes her head. "I smell blood. Check yourselves."

Maka puts a hand over her canvas bag. "The weapons, maybe?"

"No, it's not yours," Tsubaki replies, and although Maka is glad she is neither bleeding nor holding a bag of leaky explosives, she now has to digest the fact that there is someone on this planet that can identify her on blood-flavor alone.

"I don't think any of us were injured, Tsubaki," Marie says, checking the backs of the rest of the raid.

Black Star and Tsubaki exchange a silent glance while Sid says, "Gotta be a civ, then."

After some deep-breathing taste tests, Tsubaki leads them to four undead huddled over a newly dead man, his chest opened like a biology project. Once they are in sight, Tsubaki suddenly becomes ShadowStag, something furious and impossible to track in the dark, violently killing two of the four walkers with the butt of her rifle before anyone can comprehend it. Soul takes out a third while Sid beheads the fourth.

Afterward, Black Star silently regards the bloody victim, nebulous smudges dark under his eyes. He sends the man to the deep sleep when the body rises.

The blood trail from the dead man stops -- or rather starts -- between two exhibits inside Luxor: _Bodies_ , which Maka doesn't want to think about more than she must, and _Titanic_ , which isn't much better. One's an exhibition of corpses, cross-sectioned and chronicled, while the other is a shrine to the debris of a sunken cruise-liner, both housed inside a thirty story Egyptian tomb.

They try _Bodies_ first, the decision to get the worse option out of the way somewhat like ripping off the raid's collective band-aid. They pick over dusty and tangled velvet rope dividers, knocked over by the panicked crowds of the last age.

The exhibit is a cave of darkness with human-shaped silhouettes. Black Star does something with his fake leg and a red-tinted light flickers on. "Runnin' outta juice," he mutters unhappily, his voice taking on that grumbling tone that causes Maka to wonder if he's talking about his prosthesis or his caffeine addiction. Their night-vision is spared by the red-hued flashlight, but the light bounces around and points in strange directions as Black Star steps around displays of bodies in various states of purposeful decomposition, and it makes Maka more dizzy than anything.

Every body is a careful zombie-exam. Stasis or statue? Incisors or fangs?

One true walker is found by the raid, or rather by Soul, who stills and slowly raises his crowbar to touch Maka on the arm in warning. Sid is at the front of the line, and Maka mouths his name in a quiet breath, all hissing _'S'_ and emphatically implied _'there's a thing over there'_. The zombie is barely out of stasis when Black Star shines the light in its decayed face, illuminating Sid's brutally efficient strike.

Marie wonders aloud if the woman had been one of the civs.

"It's too dusty in here," Maka says.

Tsubaki agrees. "It doesn't smell like people in here," she says, leaving out the 'apart from us', which is probably because it's not applicable. Out of the six of them, only Maka and Black Star aren't some form of cured, with Maka being an anomalous runner-up to E.T., and the latter being an internet-culture Borg that smells more like processor cooling gel than anything.

This is when they all hear a muffled _pop_ come through the walls, the noise stirring some hazy memory from a back corner of Maka’s mind. She can't place it, but it nudges her into another world that makes her lungs constrict and her heart beat more rapidly than it had in the overturned van.

Head swimming, Maka follows the raid to the source of what could only have been a gunshot, filing around the entrance to the Titanic Exhibition. As Marie hurriedly applies a heavy dose of percussive maintenance to the locked doors, a piercing light flashes in Maka’s peripheral. She turns her head, glancing to the lobby doors, hearing thunder booming outside the pyramid.

Something primal in her searches for… for what? For zombies maybe, but that doesn't feel quite right. The effort is habitual, automatic, but she finds nothing but a sense of dream-like forgetfulness. She turns back to the raid, watching them all prepare for the doors to burst apart under Marie's sledgehammer, but that unnamed itch still _bothers_ her.

It takes one more glance away for her to realize she's looking for the Old Crone, and when she looks back to the raid, sick to her stomach, she watches one of the blood weapon detonate. But it’s not a fountain pink lemonade -- it's full concentrate, and it's spewing from Soul's chest.

His crowbar clatters to the floor.

She doesn't hear his scream -- doesn't feel ear-splitting pain that is supposed to occur with something of that magnitude shattering the air -- but rather _feels_ it, the vibration etching into the memory of her bones, carving with blunt knives to haunt her for the rest of her life.

She has no idea what happened, what did it, or why. She can't tell who is shouting, if she is even capable of hearing anything than the greedy _thud-thud_ of her heart in her chest while simultaneously kneeling in Soul's blood and feeling the warmth of his life washing through her hands as she tries to hold him together. Lightning flashes all around her, maybe from outside, maybe from Black Star's _foot_ , maybe from fucking Harvey from beyond the grave -- she doesn't _know,_ because Soul is _**torn.**_

Maka parses what is happening under her hands, thinking of her father dying swaddled in leather jackets, of Harvey and his organ soup, and mostly of the color red and how Soul's eyes now match the rest of him. Though the gash is a gaping diagonal line from shoulder to hip, Soul’s pale hand only presses near his stomach, and she watches in horror as a thought slams into his face -- the ' _this is how my brother felt_ ' thought -- and she wants to rip it from him lest he embrace what comes after it.

Too much is happening. The air shudders with gunfire, swirling with the smell of blood and smoke, and there's a fucking zombie coming out between the broken doors, lunging for Soul and the open-faced sandwich his chest has become. The walker is bashed in the face by Marie, struck down before Maka can even react. The undead spins away, lurching into the darkness of the Titanic exhibit with the force of the woman's swing.

The relief is short-lived as a thousand other things go wrong, from the cough-syrup gurgle of Soul's blood spilling over her fingers to the familiar whistle of a blade slicing through the white noise of chaos in her ears. Sid is cut down amongst the scattered, confused breathers, and Maka looks up in time to see two machete blades sticking out of the man's back like red-glazed wings before being retracted. As he falls, his attacker is revealed: clothed in filthy black and pale hair white at the roots with infection, a wraith-like human weaves between them all, turning to Tsubaki and spying her violet eyes. The infected civ dashes at her, screeching with both blades raised.

It's a bird, Maka thinks numbly. He or she or they, this anonymous one, reaches with outstretched talons to rid the raid of anything inhuman, and as Tsubaki attempts to block those claws with her rifle, Black Star shoots the bird from the sky.

The sudden silence after the gunshot is jarring. She hears the wet suck of air as Soul breathes in the quiet three seconds between the moment the dead civ hits the ground and the moment Sid’s body stands back up.

"Sid," Black Star says in the middle of reloading his gun, but his relief quickly morphs into dread. “You’re...”

Greyed sclera turn on Soul, and through the fang-barred mouth-windows of his face, Sid says, _"Late."_

Despair wraps around Maka so tightly that it braces her. She standing, guarding her partner, Gran's knife slippery in her bloody hand as she watches Sid's wounds burn black around the edges. _"Late,"_ he moans again.

Yes. She knows. She holds the knife up in her left hand, towards Sid's face, seeing behind the red of his eyes and finding an emptiness that begs for freedom. The ghost in the major's body moves quickly, eyes trained to the dance of Maka's blade. Sid's military-grade neck is too much for her to even dream of slicing through, but the primary reason she draws her gun is that she still can’t stain Gran’s knife with the blood of a friend. She points the long silencer barrel at his chest.

She knows the turned can talk -- usually in one or two-word sentences -- and she never has understood if what they say are their last words or something else. This time it sounds like an order from a major, so she follows it, because the Reaper is late.

The ghost-killer sows two whispering fire-seeds as Sid lunges for her. He burns like the rest had, cringing as the body blazes a path to the deep sleep, but the zombie's momentum keeps him moving, crashing into her as he dies. She slips on blood, Soul's, Sid's, Soul's, _Soul's,_ and she twists, knowing her partner is still behind her and tries not to land on him. The result is awkward and painful, and she hears a loud crack of her skull hitting marble as Sid's heavy, twitching body crushes her.

If feels as if she's been hurled head-first from a mountain. A bird on the ground is an easy target. She needs to get up. She struggles to open her eyes, finding them blurry with tears as she searches for her Soul. Maka spots him nearby, mouthing her name and reaching for her. No, not for her, she realizes, but an object that has rolled to him.

She doesn’t recognize it, her vision too blurred with... not tears. It's blood. _Shitstorm,_ her brain warns her. _No exit._

The air shakes with a howl that fills all of Luxor, thirty stories of turned rousing from stasis overhead.

"Get the hell up!" Black Star snarls at her, or maybe Sid judging by that furious, regretful edge to his voice. Regardless, he helps roll the major’s body off her as the sickening thuds of zombies plummeting off balconies increase in tempo.

Black Star hauls Maka to her feet, pulling her towards the entrance of the Titanic exhibit, where Tsubaki is shouting things Maka can't hear over the thunder of undead. Likewise, she doesn't hear whatever noise Soul makes when Marie begins dragging him between the shattered doors though she does see all color drain from his face.

She forces herself to believe that his soul is too strong to die. He won't die. He won't. That's when a falling boulder of an undead man crashes behind her, smashing into the floor. She's brought down again, this time by Black Star with a shocked yelp. Maka dizzily sits up and discovers his prosthetic shattered by the still-moving zombie. The violent removal had twisted Black Star's stump of a knee somehow, and his teeth grit in irate pain.

Maka kicks the walker away, shoving herself under Black Star’s arm and forcing her legs to stand the both of them up. The world swirls with turbulence -- she _has_ to have a concussion -- but it's her turn to be the flight attendant.

"Fuckin' DICKSAUCE," Black Star roars as they awkwardly hasten to the exhibit, the building the closest shelter they can hide under to avoid falling bodies. The artifacts and display cases rattle in the dark as the roof takes multiple hits.

 _ **"Shorty shorty go, shorty shorty go--"**_ exclaims the darkness, and the raid takes a collective breath of surprise and horror -- all but Soul. With Marie's arms under his shoulders, he wears a fearsome and somewhat delirious grin, lit up by the countdown timer on a bomb held in his hands.

Marie shouts for Tsubaki, and Tsubaki, eyes wide as dinner plates, snatches the device from Soul. She tosses it down the line, Maka sloppily catching it in her free hand.

_**"'Scuse me little mama but you could say I'm on duty, I'm lookin' for a cutie, a real big o' ghetto booty--"** _

Maka stares at the weapon in her palm, and a frantic, panicked part of her tells her she's sharkbait.

"Shit. Shit, _shitshitshit,_ " Black Star says too loudly near Maka's aching head, "Okay! Fuck yeah, goin' God-Mode." He grabs the bomb out of her hand, urging her to turn them around. Maka is used as leverage as Black Star grips her shoulder and hurls the bomb deep into the moaning shadows of the hotel. "Eat legend, bitches!"

Maka faintly sees silhouettes passing across the small glowing bomb in the distance, listening to the screeching babble of Nicki Minaj. "Should we be running?"

Pitching arm still extended as he tries to keep balance on one leg, Black Star pants out, "Yeah, prolly--" and then the dead bird he'd killed, the murderous wraith that had killed Sid, tackles them both in the doorway.

There are shouts of alarm swirling around her as she tangles in a melee of flailing limbs and snapping fangs. Somewhere in the dark tangle, she hears Black Star's Beretta fire, but the undead doesn't even flinch, straining to find flesh to devour.

It speaks little clips of syllables that she can't make sense of in the chaos, though for half a second she swears she hears the zombie say, _"Ragnarok,"_ like a sweet caress.

It occurs to Maka that the fire-seeds aren't working. She kicks frantically, trying to make room to rear her arm back to slice her knife across the zombie's neck, but she realizes her hand is very empty. She's weaponless, knife and gun lost under Sid, not even ten feet away. She curls her fingers into a fist at the last moment, going for a punch instead, but she is not lightning. She is a talon-less bird, and hadn't looked carefully enough.

The zombies teeth are all points, and they close around her fist. She screams not in pain, but rather all fury -- fury with herself, fury with her uselessness because _that is her knife hand, damn it,_ fury with this civ they'd tried to rescue turning on them and _Soul, this asshole had cut Soul away from her._

In pure madness, Maka shoves her hand further into the undead's mouth, letting it get a good taste of her last weapon, but it only gnashes its teeth harder, voice gurgling from lungs that are no longer required for function.

Black Star, gun trapped beneath the zombie's torso, shouts, "Shoot it in the fuckin' head, it's immune!"

A gun Maka can't identify in the dark is shoved to the forehead of the undead, the noise it makes as it sets a jewel between the eyes made exponentially louder by the detonation of her blood outside the doors.

 

* * *

 

 

A woman so emaciated that she seems mummified by her own clothing leads them to a replica of the Grand Staircase. Her crank-powered flashlight makes Maka's head throb as she directs them to shut a set of flimsy double-doors.

Apart from occasional slam of a body hitting the ceiling, the room is fairly quiet save heavy breathing and the noises Soul makes that pose as breathing. Marie leans him against a banister, carefully pulling apart his jacket and shirt. Maka kneels and reaches behind him, rummaging through his bag and pulling out weapon after weapon after weapon, searching for bandages or floss or _anything useful._

"How did you not fucking pack any tape, you idiot!" she hisses.

"...Hindsight, twenty-twenty," he rasps.

"He needs a bullet, not a band-aid," says Miranda Nygus, holding her flashlight on Soul but sounding as if she'd rather be pointing her gun, instead. "I've shot my pastor and my intern in the past ten minutes -- tell me again why I shouldn't shoot this one?"

Maka shakes in barely restrained anger, resisting a powerful reflex to whirl around and wrap her bare hands around the survivor's throat, but the glistening rip down Soul's chest is more important right now. Marie takes off her protective jacket and unabashedly hauls off her t-shirt before zipping her jacket back on. It's the closest thing anyone has to an uninfected bandage, and Soul bashes his head on the banister with a groan when Maka presses it his chest with her uninjured hand.

"His blood's red," Black Star says, Tsubaki helping him hop to the stairs. "He's not one of them."

"His _face_ says otherwise."

Soul grits out, "'Part from th'gapin' chest wound, feel great."

The civ doesn’t look convinced. No one does, really. Tsubaki explains, "He's been infected before, but he was cured."

Miranda fumbles for words. "...Prometheus?"

"No," says Maka. She wants to shout 'me, me, it was me,' but she knows she had nothing to do with it. She'd only been a vessel for a gift. "My blood," she says, voice hollow. She keeps her eyes away from the Miranda’s flashlight. "My blood destroys the virus."

"What-- Who **are** you people?"

"We're the fucking Resistance," Black Star spits angrily, the deaths of two (potentially three, with Soul) raiders pressing heavily on his shoulders. "You know, the people who risked everything to save some civs that weren't at the fucking safe point--"

 _"Fuck_ you, brat," the malnourished woman snaps back. "We waited for you and you never came."

 **"You don't know what waiting** _ **IS**_ **,"** he snarls. "D'you know whose blood is all over the walls in there? 'Cause _I_ do--"

"Black Star," Tsubaki says firmly, kneeling next to Maka and examining Soul's chest. "We don't have time for this. We need to get him to Stein."

There's no warning, just a corpse falling through the ornate glass ceiling of the Grand Staircase and landing five steps away from Black Star. There's a moment of stunned silence followed by curses and a scramble for firearms, but Maka’s reaction is as calm and thoughtless as breathing.

She takes the bitten hand she'd been keeping curled against her stomach, flinging dripping blood in the general direction of the zombie. Her blood continues to be as potent as ever, Black Star and Miranda pointing their guns at the writhing undead.

Maka clenches her trembling fingers. The bite doesn't burn like she'd expected. Instead, it throbs, a sickening ache travelling up her arm and swirling in her elbow. She feels the infection intimately, as if she knows the moment when another part of her DNA is rewritten.

She is becoming _other_ , and she'd been worried her blood had lost its fire. It's still there, though, evidenced by the dying zombie on the stairs. It just hadn’t been a flame big enough for the infection another anomaly -- that resistant undead -- had given her. She should probably tell them she’s infected, but Soul is soaking Marie's shirt with crimson.

Over the dying walker's moans, she asks Tsubaki, "Stein can fix him?"

One glance at ShadowStag and Maka knows when Tsubaki _knows_. Maybe her blood-flavor has changed. The woman gives her an intense look, but answers her question. "This is no worse than what I had. If we get there in time..." Her violet eyes say 'he can save you, too', but Maka knows it's impossible. If her own blood can't stop it, what could?

The flimsy double doors to the room shudder from the outside, battered by undead that hadn't been taken by the explosion. Undiluted, Maka's exposed blood is far more appetizing to them than pink lemonade. Black Star breaks radio silence, calling for assistance, but the response is garbled with static.

"Maka," Soul says, his hand wrapping around her injured one.

Sweat runs down her spine. "It doesn't hurt," she replies, trying to keep her fingers from flexing in pain.

"And this's justa papercut," he struggles to get out, calling her bluff. His eyes are fixed on hers, and she wonders what color he sees, now. Green like the trees? Or red like his chest?

"We just need to make it to the truck," Marie says, which is easier said than done. They have an emaciated woman, a man nearly cleaved in two, and a caffeine-deprived god missing a foot. Soul would need two people to get anywhere in a hurry, and Black Star another for a crutch. That left one person to act as cover fire.

Or a distraction.

Tsubaki seems to reach the same conclusion as Maka, and she stands, checking her rifle. "I'll distract them," she announces, the scars on her paling skin belying the fearless tone of voice. She's ex-brace-face in a warrior suit.

Maka doesn't look to see what kind of face Black Star has behind her when he demands in a thick voice, **"No."**

"I'll toss out some bombs, give you cover fire.”

_"I'm not gonna leave you here again, Tsu."_

“I'm the best 'gunslinger', you know it," she replies, flashing her perfect teeth.

Maka runs her tongue over her aching fangs, blood heating in a familiar forge of fever. She thinks it may be time to go to her own closet. She has the leather jacket for it now, and she shouldn’t waste the warning that zombie had been so kind to give: _Ragnarok._

Death knocks more urgently on the double doors, and Marie hurries to brace them with her weight. Maka knows her myths and legends. Ragnarok had been an apocalypse in its own right -- one that flooded the earth and destroyed gods -- and the fates of these self-made Olympians she’s trapped with aren’t looking promising.

When she gives Soul an emotionless expression, he sees straight through it in an instant, hand squeezing hers fiercely as he shakes his head. "I'll go," she tells him.

His face contorts with anguish. He takes a deep breath to change her mind, but the action only makes him bite back a groan she's already heard too many times, before. Maka stands, looking down at his betrayed face.

"I'll go," she says again, loud enough to be heard over Black Star's arguing and the walkers moaning for them.

 _"You can't go,"_ Tsubaki snaps back, helping Marie by pushing a display table against the door. "You need to see Stein."

Marie and Black Star both say, **"What,"** in flat unison.

Back still turned, her eyes stay on Soul, eagerly tracing his not-soft face. "The bombs will kill what they hit, but I'm _bleeding._ They won't lure them like I will." She adds in a voice only he can hear, "I'm full concentrate."

And when she turns to face the rest of the raid, finally letting light glint off the side of her face, she realizes she must have changed a lot, already. She can see them all clearly, even when Miranda's flashlight is pointed directly in her eyes.

"You're immune," Black Star insists, but he doesn't sound convinced, gaze fixated on her teeth.

"So was that walker," she replies blandly. More of the infection mutates in her chest, and she swallows a sick taste reminiscent of the short days she'd had with Soul in the valley. Maka holds up her bitten hand. "I'm a weapon. My timer's already ticking."

Miranda takes a step back from her in precaution, and Marie pales like a ghost when she fully grasps the situation. Maka hears the wet suck of air as Soul tries to breathe, and she exchanges a heavy look with Black Star, willing for a decision to be made quickly.

His sweaty brow furrows as plans run behind his eyes. Then, looking like every choice he's ever made has backfired on him exponentially, supernova disasters leaving scars so embedded that he never wants to sleep at night, Black Star angrily takes a wire from his collar, pulling a radio off his belt.

"You're up, Sharkbait," he says, because birds are meant for the sky, just like stars. He adds, gruff, "If you die, Imma punch you in your ugly face."

She nods.

After deciding on a rough gameplan, Tsubaki and Marie unwillingly give her a boost to the hole in the ceiling above the grand staircase. It feels like the library all over again as she pulls herself through, and Soul must feel it too. He calls beneath her, voice hoarse and pained and desperate as she flings more of her gift on the zombies still on the roof.

"Wait for me," he demands. "I'll bring Prometheus t'you."

When she has a spare moment, Maka looks down through the ceiling, catching his face. He'll live. Harvey had told her he’s lucky. She doesn't want a world without him in it, so she'll do the Grim Reaper job.

 _"Wait for me, Maka,"_ he insists, carmine eyes shining in her hunter's sight.

She smiles back, because she knows that's his favorite part of her. It's full of fangs now, but she knows it doesn't bother him -- he has always accepted her for what she is. She moves away. She won't make promises she can't keep.

Maka doesn’t need Prometheus. The gods have already given her everything they have.

 

* * *

 

 

As she flies off the black glass of the Titanic exhibit's roof, she tries to recall, midair, the name of what it is people do when they jump buildings and scale walls without stopping.

 _Parkour_ , her brain supplies as she free-falls, steadily approaching the roof of the nearby Bodies exhibit.

She does not parkour. She crashes through cheap plaster that she had not anticipated, landing gut-first on a support beam before sliding off with the wind knocked out of her lungs. Her canvas bag catches on a ventilation duct and violently halts her descent for a split-second before releasing her in a gasping heap on the floor between segmented human statues. She groans, Black Star's radio digging into her hip.

Maka stumbles to her feet, flinging blood on walkers that had fallen through the exhibit. Pain washes over her in peculiar cycles, and as she tries to get through one moment feeling human with a concussion, mutilated hand, and probably some bruised ribs, she stumbles into the next moment feeling like something _else,_ straining to make full use of her pathetic body and burning to complete the transformation to breathless eternity.

Her internal timer is ticking, but she doesn't know how much time she's been allotted, so she bursts through the building's exit and into Luxor's atrium, curving around the exhibit to find Sid's body.

She takes his short shotgun, her nerves screaming every millisecond she spends to find his extra shells. She looks longingly at her knife, still discarded on the floor with that stupid ghost-killer pistol, but she doesn't take it with her. She won't be able to use it left-handed anyway, as her right isn't exactly responding very well anymore. She apologizes to Gran or Old Crone or the combination of the two as she leaves the blade behind, offering the knowledge that if anyone would take good care of it, it would have been Sid.

Maka only manages to reload three rounds into the gun while she darts around zombies before she can't devote any more time to it. She fires once straight into a gaggle of them, using the noise to draw more attention to herself. Glancing back at the Titanic exhibit, it’s still startling to be able to see so far in the dark. Multiple sets of red eyes glint back at her, the group swarming around the exhibit now homing in on her movement.

The world swirls in warning, her body insisting she's human and is pushing herself too much, but she pushes through that, too. She brings her hand to the microphone on her shirt collar, depressing the button. "I'm headed to the lobby doors," she says as she hurdles over the withering mass of twice-dying she'd shot.

There's no response from Tsubaki, and as Maka dodges what remains of a crash-landed razor-child, her eyes catch the fluttering end of a dark wire hanging from her shirt. Of course. It must have severed when she'd plummeted through the Bodies exhibit.

She could pull the radio off her hip and talk into it directly, but she has her hands full of gun and has a wall of undead to blast through. What the scattering shot doesn't hit, she shares her blood with as she runs by. She hopes drinking all that damned Tang has paid off.

Maka soars past souvenir shops and withered, indoor palm trees. She tries to call on old memories of being on the track and field team in school, focusing on endurance running, on her breathing, on her stride, on reaching that gliding, effortless euphoria of a second-wind that lets her keep running damn near forever. She rounds a seated Anubis statue as she crunches across the broken glass doors of Luxor's entrance, heading for the parked truck that Marie, Tsubaki, and Soul had arrived in.

Attempting to keep her blood from dripping near the escape vehicle, she makes sure she catches the attention of anything not breathing nearby before purposefully running headlong into the strong winds whipping around the pyramid.

_"Maka, are you there?"_

Oh, right. She tries to clear her throat as she runs and pants, the strain of activity only accelerating the spread of infection in her blood. She pulls the radio from her belt and hurriedly glances for the push-to-talk button, turning the southeast corner of Luxor.

She finds dozens of undead idling, and she swears loudly into the radio as she skids on gravel and tries to circle around them. Many of the turned have already locked on to her, seeking their own end. It's hard to fling her blood when she's holding a gun and a radio in either hand, so she shoves the plastic antenna of the radio between her teeth and bashes the closest walker in the head with the butt-end of the shotgun, dodging around a tall palm tree and stumbling to a side street.

Trees sway chaotically in the wind, the storm that had been grumbling above Vegas the past day picking up strength. Maka urges her legs to go faster, feeling the burn of adrenaline or infection or both pulsing through her. She outdistances the mob, darting between abandoned cars and trying the radio again.

"I'm good," she gasps as her boots eat pavement, following the road. "Gonna lose me through--" she breathes, "a parking garage--"

As she follows the road through a tunnel-like building, she slows down, not wanting to completely outrun the growing horde chasing her, letting the storm's winds funnel the scent of her blood behind her like a lure. Halfway through the tunnel, she fires her last shot, hoping the deafening noise is amplified as well by the parking garage. Maka trots out the other side, shoving the short shotgun under an arm and kicking away a zombie that tries to rush her from behind a square support pillar.

She looks over her shoulder and sees an ocean of white hair flowing into the tunnel. She talks into the radio again, hoping she's still in range. "Go now! Probably your best chance!"

 _"We can pick you up,"_ comes a staticy reply, this time in Black Star's voice, but Maka keeps running, adding more and more undead to her marathon. There’s no way they can get to her -- it’s too easy to imagine the truck turning over like the van; to picture Soul's pale, pale face.

"You really **can't,"** she haggardly assures him, peeling off the road and stumbling through a stretch of volcanic gravel to avoid taking an on-ramp to the highway. She cuts across a small parking lot, clenching her bitten hand to keep the blood from clotting. She punches a bulbous, fat walker in the head as she trots past. "Get to the dam!" she pleads, turning south on a winding road and letting the cross-breeze lure everything from The Strip to the east.

She doesn't understand the next reply. Suddenly, the pavement lurches beneath her, the shotgun clattering to the ground, and she's abruptly on her knees, vomiting and gasping for breath between heaves. The abyss stares back at her, formed from her body with stomach bile and _other,_ puddling on the road. Maka coughs and scrambles to her feet, choking and blinking back tears. The time she'd lost allows the mob to close in behind her, so she shoves her hand into her bag, grabs the first thing that collides into her palm, and hurls it behind her.

A tiny baby food jar shatters, pink lemonade forming a liquid barrier that stalls any bare-footed walker that crosses it. Tsugumi's gift starts a traffic pile-up that buys Maka just enough time to stumble back into a sloppy jog, her runner's rhythm completely destroyed. Her heart pounds in her aching head, sides painfully cramping with every breath.

The road begins to slowly point southeast, and as she tries to get back into anything resembling a run, the wind buffets her so violently that she nearly topples over. The storm is too loud, and she can't hear the mob behind her, the chill silence of hundreds of undead the worst part of the nightmare. There's no panting, no catching of breath as they chase their prey, while she's the only one struggling to keep her lungs working and her eyes blacking out from tunnel-vision.

 _"-sus Christ,"_ says the radio, and she realizes she must be back in range, the raid driving down The Strip. _"Dunno if you can hear me, Sharkbait, but they're comin' for you."_ Black Star narrates as he catches his breath from what Maka imagines must have been a very long one-legged exit from Luxor to the truck. _"They don't give a damn about us."_

She's so happy that she cries, her throat filling up with infection and tears and anguish. Pain is nothing. She pushes herself harder.

It takes ten thousand years to run past the Mandalay Bay Convention Center, and the last few meters of the building gives birth to more undead that clamber up concrete stairs to meet her. She makes a tired cross between a sob and a roar as she flees them, trying not to give in to the encroaching feelings of hopelessness as hundreds more flow down the street lining the south side of the building.

The horde is forced to mash tightly together as she hurls herself beneath an overpass, each breath a desperate, gasping wheeze as she forces herself to lengthen her stride. She's dizzy and spent and there's no second-wind coming for her.

"Soul!" she wails into the radio when she comes out the other side of the bridge.

She's not going to last much longer. She's not resistant like the others. She's only Maka, ninety-nine percent immune and zero percent immortal with a shitty taste in music. She's human and other, a ticking time bomb who'd made the choice between running for cover or buying some time. She screams for him again, wanting to know his voice before she forgets her name, unwilling to die alone.

 _"Maka."_ He's all she has left in the world. _"Maka, it's not forfeit,"_ he slurs, sounding so weak and tired. _"You're not forfeit, love you, please--"_

Her throat is closing up, air whistling through her mouth, but she'll keep running until her body turns back to clay, Soul's voice urging her to live as it breaks into static.

_"Look in every fuckin' tree til I find you--"_

She'll be dead or _**dead**_ by then, but okay. She can do that much for him -- even the wind is helping her across the road, pushing her into a desert of gravel and gray mounds of dirt. And from there sees swaying in the distance, an oasis of grass and palms and green, _green like the trees,_ lightning forking overhead in boiling, colorless clouds.

She loses Soul’s voice when the raid drives out of range, and she prays to everything that still breathes in this broken reality that they make it back to the dam. Maka coughs up black blood but doesn't stop running, doesn't look back, just keeps bee-lining for an overgrown golf course in the middle of death and nowhere. She doesn't remember climbing the chain-link fence that surrounds the property, merely finds herself plummeting off the other side, slamming into lush grass and pointy weeds. She stares at the stormy sky, swallowing down bile and dark nebulae.

Her zombie fanclub collides into the fence, the sheer mass of them already bending the posts, so Maka rolls to her hands and knees, blundering away. It takes every ounce of humanity she has left to get to the nearest tree isn't a fucking palm and has actual branches, which involves trekking across a long, jungle-like fairway and leaving behind a trail of liquid _other_ as she crosses.

She barely makes it into a tree, fingernails breaking against bark as the branches sway dizzily in the wind. Sharp twigs and leaves cut into her face, but they are soft kisses compared to the exhaustion and ache that make up her body.

All around her, the Ragnarok tide of turned washes in around her tree, making swirls and eddies of rot and snowy sea foam. Good. The reaper is late, and she is going to fill the position while she still has some time left. She lets the flood gather around.

It smells like rain, she thinks idly. She shuffles across the branch, feeling more like a slug than any kind of bird, and straddles it, slowly pawing through her bag in a hazy fog of conscious thought. She finds what she's looking for: a mass of hammered metal and tangled tubes and wires.

Full concentrate. She holds Soul's Grim Reaper in her hands, like a weird, morbid offspring of the two of them. She tucks it into the crook of one arm and waits for the rain.

The tree sways, thunder booming in rib-shaking waves. Maka wishes desperately for sleep, but knows that it will never come for her until Soul finds her and Black Star punches her in the face with a bullet. Maybe they'll bury her by Wes and Harvey. She knows they're out of range, but she begins talking into the radio anyway, to maybe remember what it's like to have a conversation while she still can.

She tries to thank everyone, like Tsubaki for being kind when she had no obligation. Kindness is rare and human, and that can't be hidden behind scars. She thanks Kid for trying to be her voice, for trying to make her look more human to the humans. She thanks his 'sisters' for teaching her how to shoot a gun, even though she'd threatened to kill one of them -- they might have been friends in another life.

She asks Marie to protect Prometheus.

She thanks Stein for trying to save humanity even if it never appreciates his efforts. His first cured -- his Frankenstein's monster -- might have been her first friend at Hoover Dam, and she apologizes for shooting him. To Sid she apologizes for many more things, and she hopes the last thing she does will help start the paradise he'd been fighting for.

She tells Black Star he's a fucking baller jackass and she kind of wishes she'd had a brother like him.

She talks to them all, to Tsugumi, to Harvey, to Jacqueline, apologizing for the promises she can’t keep anymore. Sorry her hair is too short. Sorry she didn't get fat. Sorry she's an idiot -- if her fire had burned half as brightly as Jack’s, she might've lived a little longer.

By then, her voice is a hoarse rasp, blending in with the thrashing winds. She whispers for her father, for not knowing she could have kept him from blowing his smile away. She whispers for her mother, for the name she'd given her, for the hope that, wherever she may be, she is at least able to sleep peacefully. She whispers for Gran, for the guide that had haunted her through the woods, for the story she'll write for her in red.

She whispers for Soul. She loves him. She'd go through it all over again, too, just to know him for a little while. As she sees the steadily-approaching abyss that she imagines so many others had fallen into, she admits she might be afraid of heights, too.

Rain begins to fall in a scattering of warm droplets. Feverish and delirious, Maka shivers, gazing at the sea. For a moment, she hallucinates, and the crawling mess of undead stretching all around her morphs into a city of bright lights. She sees the glowing, breathing anomalies in each of the turned, souls glittering like stars.

She holds the bomb in her bad hand, using the other to twist the two oddly-shaped halves until it can't twist any further. The tubes and wires, now untangled, align symmetrically, spreading out in graceful lines on either side of a small, delicately crafted body. She stares at it, mystified, finally recognizing the shape.

It's a little sparrow.

A small timer displays a blinking '25', counting down in seconds. She waits, gathering all the hopes and dreams she has, and at four seconds remaining sets them all free with a vicious hurl to the clouds.

The sky screams, raining blood as the Grim Reaper harvests the field of souls, sending them to the deep sleep. Fat drops of rain and red slide off leaves from overhead, the trees swaying, creaking, claiming her as theirs.

She clings to the dancing branches, heart burning her body to ash as she tries to keep her name. She knows what it means, now: a story that has no words to define it because myths are written after the fact. There's something in her, a double-edged blade to unleash upon the immortal man, hope and death made into one.

At the bottom of Pandora's urn is 'Maka'.

 

* * *

 

 

Old hands pull her from a boiling red river. She's guided by the elbow to take a long rest. Someone smiles warmly and tucks her in.

 

* * *

 

 

At first, she thinks it's birdsong. She thinks maybe she's become one of them, soaring the skies away from the big cities.

But when she opens her eyes, struggling to comprehend what she’s seeing, it slowly occurs to her it's not a bird, but a girl. Tsugumi picks snowy threads from a hairbrush, quietly humming an airy rendition of Billy Joel singing _'la la la di dee da'._ The girl's accompaniment is a pair of duct-taped headphones with over-sized cans, softly playing a faint Piano Man from Maka's phone on a bedside table.

Then she sees Black Star passed out in his wheelchair, neon blue hair faded to pastel with brown roots. Even asleep he kind of looks like a jackass.

 

* * *

 

 

She learns Liz and Patti 'we don't give a shit about your survivors' Thompson had found her. Their raid team had heard her whispers on the radio.

"Kid made contact," Prometheus tells her while Miranda Nygus helps her put on socks ( _socks_ , when had they found socks?) because Maka's fingers are too weak to pull them over her heels. "His father was the chief of staff of Japan's airspace defense," he says boredly, scrolling through what she's pretty sure is some kind of e-reader tablet. He’s upgraded. She’s happy for him. "They're fitting planes with the boys' fumigator designs."

Boys. Plural. "Soul," she wheezes, throat feeling orange with rust.

He doesn't even look up from his tablet. "He's fine. He's the reason you're alive." Stein frowns for a moment. "I suppose you're also the reason _he's_ alive, as much as I'd enjoy throttling you both."

The doctor paints her a monotone story in which Soul had arrived at Hoover Dam on the doorstep of death, curiously untainted with infection though he'd been attacked by the same weapons that had turned Sid. A secret had slept in his blood, a fluke combination of his strong resistance and Maka's cure. The answer had been him all along.

Stein made a new formula based from Soul. "It still takes several days to complete, but I'm working the kinks out of it," he says, taking off his glasses and looking at her with his quicksilver eyes. "You're the first patient."

In the mirror Nygus holds for her, forest green squints back with normal pupils. Maka notes her two-tone hair is in short little pigtails, tarnished blonde ending in snow.

 

* * *

 

 

He apologizes that an electric car isn't as cool as a motorcycle, but she sticks her arm out the window as he drives and she feels like she's flying. He takes her to grass and trees. The reclaimed park is one of the first public zombie-free zones that had been established while she had slept. It still kind of smells like diluted blood, but she doesn't care.

"Stein thinks the shot would change me back," he starts casually, toeing off his sneakers as he reclines in the grass.

Maka feels roots under her hands, letting the bark gently shape patterns into her palms. "It doesn't matter," she says.

Soul wears the kind smirk he only has for her. “Yeah. That's what I told him, too."

Carefully, because she's a little atrophic and his chest is still tender, she brings him close and kisses him. "I love you," she says, voice flat, but he's been able to hear her heart singing for a long time, already. "I'm so glad I met you."

Soul holds her face in his larger hands and tastes her.

It doesn't matter what he looks like. She could recognize him in any color, in any shape, because what matters is the soul. And there are millions more to free to the deep sleep in this world she had chosen to keep, but they can do it together, with the help of everyone.

She knows without a doubt that lightning had carefully struck them in that tree.

 

* * *

 

 

In the fourth year, Maka Albarn sips pickle juice and frowns at her phone, watching the Twitter feed get spammed with BlackStar's disgusting rap sonnets to ShadowStag. Soul places giant headphones over her distended stomach, determined to start a new generation with a decent taste in music.

 

* * *

 

 

end.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to every one of you who have supported me while writing this, either silently or otherwise. Thank you for all the wonderful, inspiring reviews, reblogs, comments, and beautiful fanart. I want to give special thanks to Lueur for starting me on the whole Prometheus gravy train, and to VictoriaPyrrhi for being there every ridiculous step of the way even though I was a whiny recluse the entire time.  
> ...Also thanks to Google Maps for putting up with my constant zooming in on the streets of Vegas and Hoover Dam and never asking why I wanted to look at the shittiest places in town from every angle imaginable.
> 
> I would also like to thank Monkkeyslut for her wonderful story ‘So I Stayed in the Darkness with You’, a prequel to this story centered around Black Star and Tsubaki. You did a superb job, darling. I am honored.


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